The essential remaining hardware bit (a cheap Chinese USB mic) arrived the other day, so this morning I burned the Picroft disk image to a USB card, set up the Pi, plugged in the mic and a speaker, booted the thing up ...
... and discovered, while searching for the meaning of strange error messages online, that the Mycroft/Picroft projects are apparently dead and have been for some time.
Oddly, none of that showed up during my original research into implementing the thing.
Not the end of the world. There are apparently newer, better, similar projects. Maybe I'll get one selected and set up next week so I can tell you about something that worked instead of about something that failed.
My main interest in Mycroft/Picroft was that my information wouldn't be going to Amazon for its proprietary business use (including potential forwarding to government agencies), as it does with Alexa. I'm not sure that the available alternatives will preserve any privacy (they seem to be hooking into Large Language Model AI stuff), but I doubt they'll be any worse as far as all that goes.
