Home assistant has a voice assistant but it isn't a voice assistant. Also, you are correct it is made to control a smart home (at the moment) that also include music threw external provider (or local files) but you can't search the internet threw it. You can either install it locally or pay for home assistant subscription which include voice assistant threw cloud.

I'm not 100% sure but this might also depend which OS you are running on your pi. Did change from SD card to SSD few years back for my home assistant setup (now running with a mini pc) at the time I went for a geekpi adapter (can't recall exact model).

Try a quick ducduck search "sata adapter #yourOS#" and see if a list come up. Here is one for HA (but surely more models are compatible than the ones listed here) https://community.home-assistant.io/t/working-usb-enclosures-and-adapters-with-hassos/212763

Edit: as for SSD, I went for Samsung EVO model

Sidenote: all SSD will be more reliable than a sd card because they are less sensitive to rewrite counts

Thanks for the heads-up, haven't tried webrtc. Something still missing for me is person detection, with luck it will be added in future as this has been requested by some user to tplink R&D (at this moment, this feature doesn't comply with onvif standard).

None the less, they are good and cheap devices.

I don't have any but I've seen reolink mentioned a lot, cheaper would be tapo camera (what I have), I know some tapo have baby cry alert but don't know if this function works with hacs component. For Tapo, once setup inside app you can block internet access to the camera threw your router or else. https://github.com/JurajNyiri/HomeAssistant-Tapo-Control

I don't see why you think those are web based, usually people run this at home but glad you find what you are looking for

As far as photo librabry, you can compare the different solutions at https://github.com/meichthys/foss_photo_libraries

on your card, click on the three dots. You should have more options there. If it doesn't work, change "intial_hvac_mode" to "cool"

edit: didn't see your next replied, glad you work it out

Redlib ?

Relying on 4 nvme drive for low power isn't ideal as nvme drive needs about twice more power compare to sata SSD.

You can use an helper to toggle from one to another and use an automation to trigger it (or a simple switch on your dashboard).

But if I were you, I would use a community add-on as dual AC isn't a niche, I guess it will keep being updated in future. I've been using some community add-on for a couple of years and none have been dropped til now.

Instead of using a community add-on, you can create two generic thermostat. https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/generic_thermostat/

On your Xiaomi first time you launched app, you can determine wether you always allow or allow on prompt (but you should still be able to manage that setting afterwards). You also need to disable battery optimization for that app and set app to be able to auto launch in background. This is at least what I do with my home assistant app to determine GPS location in background (app record every 15mn) and no issues with battery draining.