Is gutting an old smart speaker for a local voice assistant actually worth it?

I converted one of my old pucks about six months back and it's still sitting on the kitchen shelf working fine, so I'd say give it a shot with one of yours before buying anything. The part nobody warns you about is the wiring. You have to trace the mic and speaker lines yourself and figure out where the new board taps in, and that took me a whole Saturday afternoon with a multimeter. Once it was done though, the audio is noticeably better than the cheap round kit boards my friend has. The enclosure was designed by actual audio engineers, so voices come out clearer and there's less of that tinny sound. The tradeoff is updates. When the firmware for the voice assistant changes, I have to flash it over my own wiring setup, and if I botch a connection I'm troubleshooting solder joints instead of just unplugging a USB cable. My friend swaps his purpose-built board around in two minutes when he wants to test something new. So my honest take is do one puck as a fun project, keep the other in the drawer as a spare, and if it turns out you hate the maintenace then buy a proper board for the second spot. Worst case you're out an afternoon and you learned something about how these things fit togehter.

I went the purpose-built route and never looked back. Bought one of the round ESP32-S3 voice kits for about twenty bucks a while back, flashed it, had it answering from Home Assistant in under an hour. No soldering, no multimeter, no tracing wires on a cramped little board while wondering if I was about to kill the mic array. My time is worth something, and the conversion path just burns too much of it for a single unit. The audio arguement doesn't hold up for me either. The puck speaker was tuned for Alexa's cloud processing, which did a lot of heavy lifting on wake word detection. Once that's gone, the mic pickup in a noisy room is noticeably worse than the dedicated kit with its built-in audio front end. Mine sits in the living room where the TV runs and it still picks me up from across the couch. The drawer pucks are a sunk cost either way. Keeping them as dumb Bluetooth speakers via the AUX out is honestly thier best second life, and you skip the whole surgery. Buy the kit, keep the puck for music, everyone wins.

One thing I'd want tested before committing either way is wake word reliability, becuase the mic holes on that puck were positioned for the original electronics and I'd be curious wether a swapped board still hears you from across a noisy kitchen. The person who did the kitchen shelf conversion, does it trigger reliably when the dishwasher is running or when you're a few metres away? Also, before reusing the original wall adapter, I'd verify what input voltage the new board actually expects, since those old supplies aren't necessarily a match.

The thing I never see mentioned with these swaps is you lose the light ring. On my unit the LED ring runs off the original board, so once you pull that out the puck gives you zero feedback when the wake word fires. I do appliance repair for a living, and I've learned the hard way that a device with no status indicator gets blamed for problems it doesn't have. My wife thought ours was dead for a week when it was actually just not hearing her. If the project you found doesn't drive that ring somehow, I'd factor that into the decision before committing either puck to a wall.