There aren’t any immediate drop in replacements that won’t require some work, but there is Home Assistant Voice - It just requires that you also have a Home Assistant server setup, which is the more labor intensive part. It’s not hard, just a lot to learn.

Stupid that we have to do this, but add before:2022 and it filters out all the slop

I run my pi-hole on a dedicated Pi, and I pull the updated image first without any trouble. Then after the updated image is pulled, recreating the container only takes a few seconds.

Dunno what’s broken about your setup, but it definitely sounds like something unusual to me.