--- title: "Ecosystems Part 5: Owning the Place (Home Assistant Under Siri, Google and Alexa)" description: Home Assistant lets you own your smart home and keep Siri, Gemini or Alexa as the voice. See how it bridges all three for mixed iPhone and Android homes. --- # [Ecosystems Part 5: Owning the Place (Home Assistant Under Siri, Google and Alexa)](https://homenetworks.com.au/smart-home-networks-and-iot-blog/home-assistant-with-siri-google-and-alexa) Written by [Dave Gilmore](https://homenetworks.com.au/smart-home-networks-and-iot-blog/author/dave-gilmore) | Oct 31, 2026, 4:39:38 AM *Choosing your ecosystem, part 5 of 8. New to the series? [Start with part 1](https://homenetworks.com.au/smart-home-networks-and-iot-blog/apple-google-or-amazon-choosing-a-smart-home-ecosystem).* **The short version:** Home Assistant lets you own your smart home instead of renting it. Your devices, automations and history live on a small box in your house, and Apple, Google and Amazon become the voices at the front door rather than the landlords holding the keys. You can keep Siri, Gemini or Alexa. You just stop depending on them. We’ve now toured all three buildings on the street. Apple’s tidy apartment, Google’s share house with the clever landlord, and Amazon’s flat above the shop. All three are perfectly liveable, and all three have the same weakness: the landlord can change the rules, raise the rent or knock down a wall whenever head office decides to. This post is about buying your own place. ## What owning actually means Home Assistant is free, open-source home automation software. It runs on a small computer in your house (one of our [smart home hubs](https://homenetworks.com.au/smart-home-hubs), or a box you’ve built yourself) and connects to devices from thousands of brands directly, over your own network, wherever the device allows it. Owning means three things in practice. The keys are yours: every device is paired to Home Assistant first, so no single company can lock you out of your own lights. The rules are yours: your automations run on the hub in your cupboard, so "turn the porch light on when the gate opens" keeps working when the internet goes down or a company shuts a service. And the visitor book is yours: device history, energy data and camera recordings stay on your own storage, and you choose what, if anything, leaves the house. ## The landlords become concierges You don’t have to give up the voice assistant your family is used to. Once Home Assistant holds the keys, Apple, Google and Amazon can each be hired as a concierge: they answer the door, take a message, and pass it to the owner. Home Assistant decides which devices each concierge is allowed to touch. | Concierge | How Home Assistant shares devices with it | Runs locally? | Ongoing cost | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Apple (Siri, Home app, HomeView) | HomeKit Bridge | Yes, entirely on your network | None | | Google (Gemini, Google Home app) | Home Assistant Cloud, or a manual Google Cloud setup | No, routed through Google’s cloud | US$6.50/month for HA Cloud, or free with the manual setup | | Amazon (Alexa, Alexa app) | Home Assistant Cloud, or a manual AWS setup | No, routed through Amazon’s cloud | US$6.50/month for HA Cloud, or free with the manual setup | | Any of them, device by device | Matter multi-admin | Yes, for the device itself | None | One Home Assistant Cloud subscription covers both Google and Alexa, as well as secure remote access and offsite backups. It’s being renamed Home Assistant Link in December, and it’s also how the Home Assistant project pays its developers, which is no bad thing. ## The mixed household finally works This is the quiet superpower of owning. In a rented smart home, a family with one Android phone and three iPhones has to pick a landlord, and somebody loses. With Home Assistant underneath, the iPhone users talk to Siri and the Home app through the HomeKit Bridge, the Android user talks to Gemini through Google Home, the kids yell at the Echo in the rumpus room, and every one of them is turning on the same lights through the same automations. It also solves the visiting grandparent problem. Nobody needs to install anything or join anything to use a wall tablet in the kitchen or a physical switch by the door, and both of those talk straight to Home Assistant. ## The radios that make it independent Most of what makes a rented smart home hard to leave is radio. Zigbee devices are paired to an Echo or a Hue Bridge, Thread devices lean on a HomePod or Nest Hub as their border router, and Wi-Fi devices talk to a manufacturer’s cloud. An owned smart home has its own radios. A Zigbee and Thread coordinator connected to the hub, like the SONOFF Dongle Max we supply configured with our smart home hubs, means Zigbee sensors pair to Home Assistant directly and Home Assistant runs its own Thread border router. (As we covered in the [Apple](https://homenetworks.com.au/blog/apple-home-and-home-assistant) and [Google](https://homenetworks.com.au/blog/google-home-and-home-assistant) posts, it can also join an existing Apple or Google Thread mesh so you end up with one strong network instead of two weak ones.) For Wi-Fi devices, we favour brands with a local integration or Matter support, so the device keeps working if the manufacturer’s cloud doesn’t. ## A voice that doesn’t leave the house The last thing the landlords had over owners was the voice. That gap is closing. Home Assistant’s own voice assistant, Assist, can turn speech into actions entirely on your own hardware, and on a hub with enough grunt (our [AI Hub range](https://homenetworks.com.au/smart-home-hubs) is built for this) it can run a local language model so it understands "it’s a bit dark in here" rather than needing exact commands. It isn’t as polished as Siri, Gemini or Alexa+ yet, and we won’t pretend otherwise. But for a household that wants nothing it says leaving the house, it’s now a real option rather than a hobby project. Plenty of our customers run both: a local voice in the bedrooms and a commercial assistant in the kitchen. ## Where the owner sits on your network In [The Seating Chart](https://homenetworks.com.au/smart-home-networks-and-iot-blog/part-6-the-seating-chart-which-devices-belong-on-which-network) we put the smart home hub on VLAN 20, Servers, as the deliberate exception allowed to reach the IoT and camera VLANs and to answer the phones on Trust. That still holds, with one refinement now that we’ve met Thread and Matter. Matter devices and Thread border routers find each other through announcements on the local network segment, and those don’t cross VLANs on their own. So in a Thread or Matter home we give the hub a leg on VLAN 50 as well, either a second network port or a tagged VLAN interface on the same port. The hub lives in Servers, but it has a door straight into the IoT room where the devices and the landlords’ border routers are. It’s one deliberate exception, written down in the firewall rules, rather than a pile of accidental ones. ## The honest trade-off Owning is more work than renting. Home Assistant updates every month, a backup strategy matters, and occasionally an integration breaks because a manufacturer changed their cloud. That’s the plumbing, and somebody has to fix it. That somebody can be you. Plenty of our customers enjoy it, and our bundles ship unconfigured for exactly that reason. Or it can be us: we offer partial help and done-for-you setup, from getting the hub running and the radios paired through to the full migration away from whichever landlord you’re with now. ## Coming up Speaking of leaving: plenty of people reading this are already deep in one ecosystem and wondering how to get out. The next three posts are moving guides. First up is breaking the lease with Google, Nest cameras and all. 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