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You need to look at Home Assistant. https://home-assistant.io/

Detractors aside, Python is a great language. Of course, like all languages it has its warts.

But flexibility wise, it is awesome.

Learning Python has been on my to do list for decades, and finally I got to it last year.

Among the things I developed with it is a small web application specific to one project (a form that users fill, and get back a configuration file). This used the Bottle framework.

I am also using Micropython on ESP8266 and ESP32 microcontrollers, and it is easy to press Ctrl-C and have a Python prompt over USB! Debugging is very easy, and the language is very easy.

Not to mention things like Home Assistant, which is written in Python, and writing custom modules for it was pretty easy, once you got to learn HA's API.

So Guido: thank you so much for decades of making things work for us. I wish I have learned it sooner, but better late than never ...

Home Assistant doesn't. But wait .. its domain name does. How did you know that was going to happen?!?

Compare this to the current paradigm, where there's a cloud provider for each brand of device, with different authentication information for each.

That is not the current paradigm; it's just one of them. I think most reasonably-intelligent people realize that "cloud providers" are usually one of the worst ways to handle most applications. (Do you know anyone who uses Google Docs or Office 365? I don't.)

If your home automation uses cloud providers, it's because you chose to put some random strangers in charge of your stuff instead of having your own hass (or OpenHab or whatever) talking z-wave to your stuff.

But either approach has the same problem, once you decide to allow remote control of things (e.g. hubby and wife's phones). If there's a break up, then someone needs to revoke someone else's access. But that's the same whether we're talking about light switches, the car or the kid or the house itself. People have had this IoT problem for thousands of years, figuratively. It's just that now, it has grown to include more things, such as light switches. Talk to a 1968 divorcee, though, and you'll near similar stories. ("What?! He terminated the milk delivery! What? He was spotted sneaking into the back yard, unlocking the shed with his own key, and he took something out! Hey, where's my car?! My son didn't come home from school and I called and they said his father picked him up!!")

Breakups are a hard problem to solve.

Mycroft and Hass.io may interest you.

You can self host with multiple different programs. I use Home Assistant running on a Pi in the basement.

I pay $0 in recurring costs.

5.1M is considered a failure?

Everyone I know with one personally likes. I bought our Echo on pre-order as a Prime member and have since bought 2 dots. One for my office and one for my shop. Companies are

It has a lot of problems, it's nowhere near Star Trek's but it's a really good Alpha. They are adding a lot of tools and it's pretty trivial to setup your own. I use HomeAssistant to run our smart switches.

I doubt he did everything from scratch.

Lucida from the University of Michigan looks to be a good self hosted solution to a backend and Jasper a good voice front end.

Home Assistant integrates well with both Google Home and Amazon Echo.

He had to tell the system four times to turn the lights off before it got dark."

Then again, it sounds like he might have. Echo+HASS is much more consistent than that.