I'm coming back to you from the future to tell you that she can. 😥

I'm running an Intel Meteor Lake laptop with Linux and it's reasonably well supported with pretty fresh kernels (6.7 and later). Compared to an AMD desktop that I use, both have had occasional minor defects. The Intel systems have also done a lot to close the performance and perf-per-watt, even under Linux.

I think the graphics performance and compatibility is a bit better on AMD. That would be the only reason I've experienced to lean that direction. But I think both are very usable, so other factors like price, availability, recency, are probably larger factors to focus on.

However, the Federal government has limited options when it comes to influencing the provincial health care programs. They can offer money with strings attached, and that's about it. Given the hostile atmosphere from some provinces... they may not have been able to offer dental care by working through this traditional means.

Home Assistant invested quite a bit into the technology to create a FOSS voice assistant over the past year. It still needs quite a bit of work, but the foundation is there; it supports wake words ("Hey ..."), speech-to-text to hear your command, interpretation and command processing, and text-to-speech to return results.

The downsides are that it's still quite technical to set up primarily due to the lack of commercially available hardware, and the command library is fairly small at this point.

With some of this foundational work out of the way, I expect Home Assistant to move forward quickly to improve, and other projects can work off the same pieces if they desire to as well.

Here's their year-end post about it: https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/12/13/year-of-the-voice-chapter-5/