As others have commented, the open source home assistant project can take voice commands and perform smart home functions like turning lights on and off, reading off the forecast, taking down notes, etc etc. But it does have limits, you will have to script any kind of complex commands, like pulling headlines from an RSS feed, or playing spotify playlists, or really anything that requires fetching info from an API, it won’t do those kinds of things out of the box.

The other factor which others have called out is that it doesn’t currently handle wake word functionality, though that’s been on their road map this year and the Oct update might fix that. That being said, running a dedicated wake word app to fill in that gap is very much possible. See my thread here for more info: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/setting-up-a-100-local-smart-speaker-on-an-android-tablet-using-tasker-and-snowboy-to-handle-wake-word-detection/611435

Interesting, can I ask a couple questions about that setup? How did you go about connecting all the pieces? Is it all handled locally? What hardware are you running it on? Do you have any good resources/tutorials you followed?

I have foscam cameras and have been pretty happy with them. Regardless of the brand, make sure you firewall them from the internet or they will phone home.

Reason I went with foscam was because at the time they were the only brand with an outdoor PoE camera that had a spotlight, 2-way audio, PIR, and ONVIF support. Which was what I wanted for an entryway camera. They’ve since discontinued that “SPC” model, so if I had to do it over again I would be just as likely to pick reolink (had shitty luck with amcrest).

I have been very happy with my venstar colortouch. It has a well documented local API, with a cloud option and mobile app if you’re comfortable with that. The HA integration is great as well.