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Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware
As the Home Assistant project says, it's the year of voice!<p>I love Home Assistant and I've always thought the ESP BOX[0] hardware is cool. I finally got around to starting a project to use the ESP BOX hardware with Home Assistant and other platforms. Why?<p>- It's actually "Alexa/Echo competitive". Wake word detection, voice activity detection, echo cancellation, automatic gain control, and high quality audio for $50 means with Willow and the support of Home Assistant there are no compromises on looks, quality, accuracy, speed, and cost.<p>- It's cheap. With a touch LCD display, dual microphones, speaker, enclosure, buttons, etc it can be bought today for $50 all-in.<p>- It's ready to go. Take it out of the box, flash with Willow, put it somewhere.<p>- It's not creepy. Voice is either sent to a self-hosted inference server or commands are recognized locally on the ESP BOX.<p>- It doesn't hassle or try to sell you. If I hear "Did you know?" one more time from Alexa I think I'm going to lose it.<p>- It's open source.<p>- It's capable. This is the first "release" of Willow and I don't think we've even begun scratching the surface of what the hardware and software components are capable of.<p>- It can integrate with anything. Simple on the wire format - speech output text is sent via HTTP POST to whatever URI you configure. Send it anywhere, and do anything!<p>- It still does cool maker stuff. With 16 GPIOs exposed on the back of the enclosure there are all kinds of interesting possibilities.<p>This is the first (and VERY early) release but we're really interested to hear what HN thinks!<p>[0] - <a href="https://github.com/espressif/esp-box">https://github.com/espressif/esp-box</a>
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