Self-hosted · Private by design
Ember
A voice assistant that lives in your house, not in ours.
Ember is a self-hosted voice assistant and home control system. It listens, answers questions, and runs your lights, music and routines from a server in your own home.
What Ember does
Ember is a voice assistant you run yourself, on your own hardware, instead of renting from somebody else. A small server in your home does the listening and the thinking; microphone nodes around the rooms talk to it over your own network; and phone and desktop apps let you see and control the same thing by hand.
Day to day, it does four things:
- Answers questions out loud. Say the wake word once and keep talking — Ember follows the thread of a conversation instead of making you re-state it every sentence.
- Controls the house. Lights, scenes, media playback and routines, by voice or from the apps.
- Keeps track of your day. With a Google account connected, it can answer questions about your calendar and add or move events for you.
- Plays what you ask for. It can find and play videos and music on a screen or speaker in the house, including from your own YouTube playlists and subscriptions.
Nothing about it is a hosted service. There is no Ember cloud: the recordings, the transcripts and the answers stay on the machine you put them on, and there is no account of ours holding a copy.
Why Ember asks for Google permissions
Connecting a Google account is optional, and Ember works without one — you turn each connection on yourself and can disconnect it at any time. When you do connect one, this is every permission Ember requests and exactly what it is used for:
| Permission | What Ember does with it |
|---|---|
| Your name, email address and profile picture | Identifies which household member is signing in, so Ember can keep one person's settings and history separate from another's. |
| Google Calendar | Lets Ember answer spoken questions about your schedule — what is next, when you are free — and add or move events when you ask it to. |
| YouTube | Lets Ember find and play videos and music on a screen or speaker in your home, and reach your own playlists and subscriptions when you ask for something from them. |
Ember does not use any of it for advertising, does not sell or transfer it to anyone, and does not train any model on it. The full detail — what is stored, for how long, and how to delete it — is in the Privacy Policy, along with Ember's Limited Use commitment under the Google API Services User Data Policy.
Who makes Ember
Ember is a small independent project, not a company with a sales team. If something is wrong, or you want your data removed, one person reads the mail: [email protected].