Surprising things I learned putting together a Home Brain (opens in new tab)

So, I’m trying to put together something I call a “Home Brain”, a conversational system I can interact with that not only allows me to control IoT devices in my home, but also contains personal knowledge I can access, and also more general knowledge (think wikipedia), and yet all this functionality should run locally, with no cloud services required. I initially started down this path with Home Assistant, adding all of our IoT devices into Home Assistant running on an RPi, which worked fine, ...