Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware

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?

- 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.

- It's cheap. With a touch LCD display, dual microphones, speaker, enclosure, buttons, etc it can be bought today for $50 all-in.

- It's ready to go. Take it out of the box, flash with Willow, put it somewhere.

- It's not creepy. Voice is either sent to a self-hosted inference server or commands are recognized locally on the ESP BOX.

- 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.

- It's open source.

- 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.

- 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!

- It still does cool maker stuff. With 16 GPIOs exposed on the back of the enclosure there are all kinds of interesting possibilities.

This is the first (and VERY early) release but we're really interested to hear what HN thinks!

[0] - https://github.com/espressif/esp-box

Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware
github.com

If I'm being perfectly honest I'm surprised we got it this far already. If I wanted to be really critical:

- Far-field speech is actually kind of hard. There are at least dozens of "knobs" we can tweak between the various component libraries, etc to improve speech quality and reliability for more users in more environments. We've tested as much as we can considering there's only two of us but we need more testing from more speakers in more environments.

- On the wire/protocol stuff. We're doing pretty rudimentary "open new connection, stream voice, POST somewhere". This adds extra latency and CPU usage because of repeated TLS handshakes, etc. We have plans to use Websockets and what-not to cut down on this.

- We don't really support audio playback yet. For a real "Amazon Echo" type experience you need to be able to ask it random things like "Hey what's the weather outside?" and it needs to "tell" you.

- Ecosystem support. Using the example above, something like Home Assistant or similar needs to know where you are, get the weather, do text to speech, etc for Willow to be able to play it back.

- Other integrations. Alexa has "skills" and stuff and we need to be able to talk to more things.

- UI/UX work. We support the touch display but we did just enough to show colors, print status, add a button, and make a touch cursor that follows your finger around. We also only give audio feedback with a kind-of annoying tone that beeps once for success and twice for failure.

- Speaking of failure, we don't do a great job of telling you what went wrong and where.

- Configuration and flashing. It's very static and has multiple steps. There are all kinds of things that need to get done to make Willow easy enough for less-technical users to deploy and actually use daily without any hassle.

- Local command recognition. It's very early but as noted in the README, wiki, etc the ESP BOX itself can recognize up to 400 commands directly on the device. In testing it works surprisingly well but we have a lot of work to do to make it actually practical for most people.

- Open sourcing our inference server. We plan to do this next week!