I wanted a solution where I had local control and no YAML configuration or dependence on cloud services. Although I thought Home Assistant was very powerful, it seemed to be too complicated for my needs, and the cloud-based services had raised concerns about privacy. Gladys met all my requirements.
Gladys Assistant
Dial
twelve years on the same project, from a Raspberry Pi in a bedroom to a real v5, is its own answer to whether the local-first pitch is sustainable. one thing that stands out: the free tier is fully local and offline-capable, but Gladys Plus adds "an AI assistant" as a paid feature. does that assistant run against a cloud LLM, and if so how do you square that with the rest of the pitch being "runs on hardware you own, keeps working when the internet goes down"?