Do not invite the panopticon into your home.

You couldn't pay me to put one of those fuckin things in my home. Like, I'm the kind who leaves their phone in another room when they're not expecting calls or texts, unhooks the usb mic and webcam from both ends when done using them, and avoids all these "home assistants" that are definitely feeding 24/7 raw audio of your house to the NSA; idk how people can be so OPSEC-free as to let these Alexas, Echos, and Google Homes pass through their front door.

Oh man, my wife gets trolled by Google Home all the time.

Her: "OK Google, set an alarm for twenty past six, please." Google: "Sure. Your alarm is set for five twenty AM." Her: "OK Google, change alarm to twenty past six, please." Google: "OK, changed your alarm to seven twenty AM." Me: "OK Google, change alarm to six twenty." Google: "Sure. Your alarm is set for six twenty AM."

Though often she just trolls herself by assuming it's way more magical than it really is, making up her own wake word and blurting instructions at the speed of light:

"Heygoo-set-a-timer-for-ten-minutes"

She doesn't bother to wait for confirmation or even to check that it's woken up, and then pulls surprise Pikachu face when 15 minutes later the food is burnt and the timer didn't go off.

I just want a speaker I can cast to that isn't also logging every sound I make to the FBI. The Google Audio thing was so much cooler then the homes.

Nest is garbage. Gotta roll your own home automation systems

For someone who wants a "dumb" Wi-Fi speaker:

I think what you want is a DLNA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLNA) speaker but I'm not sure how easy it is to get that working.

Windows supposedly supports it out fo the box: https://superuser.com/a/1631206

To play from iOS you may need a speaker that also supports AirPlay.

idk, it doesn't seem like it's super out of the box, but better than nothing.

AirPlay seems like the newer protocol since it uses mDNS (invented by Apple I think, but super standard now) instead of UPnP (a more finicky older protocol for service discovery)

Decent reddit thread on it: https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/q01n3r/any_micless_speakers_for_tv_home_assistant/

This looked decent: https://www.sonos.com/en-us/shop/one-sl (just don't install the app I guess) (also has ethernet which is cool, so it can be used without wifi)