Does it also work with the lite version of ESP box?
Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware
31–40 of 141 posts
Re: Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware
#32Wow this looks beyond epic. I've been looking for something like this.
Going to try to hack this into something my mom can use (who has trouble with confusion and memory). Could potentially be very great.
Thank you
Re: Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ESP BOX has an acoustically optimized enclosure with dual microphones for noise cancelation, separation, etc. Between that and the Espressif AFE (audio frontend interface) doing a bunch of DSP "stuff" in our testing it does remarkably well in noisy environments and far-field (25-30 feet) use cases. Our inference server implementation (open source, releasing next week) uses a highly performance optimized Whisper w…
What’s the latency on inference on a rasbpi (I assume it’s not running it direct on the device)? I think I read previously that it was up to 7 secs, and if you wanted sub-second you’d need an i5.
Willow supports the Espressif ESP SR speech recognition framework to do completely on device speech recognition for up to 400 commands. When configured, we pull light and switch entities from home assistant and build the grammar to turn them on and off. There's no reason it has to be limited to that, we just need to do some extra work for better dynamic configuration and tighter integration with Home Assistant to allow users to define up to 400 commands to do whatever they want with their various entities.
With local command recognition with Willow I can turn my wemo switches on and off, completely on device, in roughly 300ms. That's not a typo. I'm going to make another demo video showing that.
We also support live streaming of audio after wake to our highly optimized Whisper inference server implementation (open source, releasing next week). That's what our current demo video uses[0]. It's really more intended for pro/commercial applications as it supports CPU but really flies with CUDA - where even on a GTX 1060 3GB you can do 3-5 seconds of speech in ~500ms or so.
We also plan to have a Willow Home Assistant component to support Willow "stuff" while enabling use of any of the STT/TTS modules in Home Assistant (including another component for our inference server you can self-host that does special Willow stuff).
Re: Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware
#34Sounds interesting - one question I have is about the mic array... Isn't this one of the supposed benefits of a physical Alexa device, and rumored to be sold at a loss because of the quality. How does the esp-box compare? E.g. in a noisy environemnt, tv in the background, kids and dogs running around?
The ESP BOX has an acoustically optimized enclosure with dual microphones for noise cancelation, separation, etc. Between that and the Espressif AFE (audio frontend interface) doing a bunch of DSP "stuff" in our testing it does remarkably well in noisy environments and far-field (25-30 feet) use cases. Our inference server implementation (open source, releasing next week) uses a highly performance optimized Whisper w…
Where can I get one? I can't find it on Ali :(
Re: Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware
#35Wow this looks beyond epic. I've been looking for something like this. Going to try to hack this into something my mom can use (who has trouble with confusion and memory). Could potentially be very great. Thank you
Thanks!
We are really, truly, and seriously committed to building a device that with support from Home Assistant and other integrations doesn't leave any reason whatsoever to buy an Echo or similar creepy commercial device. No compromises on cost, performance, accuracy, speed, usability, functionality, etc.
We're really looking forward to getting additional testing and feedback from the community on speech recognition results, other integrations, etc. It's just two of us working on this part time over the last month or so - this is VERY early but I think we're off to a good start!
Re: Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ESP BOX has an acoustically optimized enclosure with dual microphones for noise cancelation, separation, etc. Between that and the Espressif AFE (audio frontend interface) doing a bunch of DSP "stuff" in our testing it does remarkably well in noisy environments and far-field (25-30 feet) use cases. Our inference server implementation (open source, releasing next week) uses a highly performance optimized Whisper w…
Where can I get one? I can't find it on Ali :(
You never know if people are going to love your pet project as much as you do. We had a hunch the community would appreciate Willow but like I said, you just never know.
My suspicion is Espressif (until now, hah) hasn't sold a lot of ESP Boxes. We were concerned that if Willow takes off they will sell out. That already appears to be happening.
Espressif has tremendous manufacturing capacity and we hope they will scale up ESP BOX production to meet demand now that (with Willow) it exists. The only gaiting item for them is probably the plastic enclosure and they should be able to figure out how to produce that en masse :).
Re: Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware
#37Very interesting, I would buy an "off the shelf" version if it worked out of the box with Vicuna13 or similar LLM.
Our inference server (open source - releasing next week) has support for loading LLaMA and derivative models complete with 4-bit quantization, etc. I like Vicuna 13B myself :). Not to mention extremely fast and memory optimized Whisper via ctranslate2 and a bunch of our own tweaks. Our inference server also supports long-lived sessions via WebRTC for transcription, etc applications ;). You can chain speech to text ->…
Awesome work! May I ask what are you using for text-to-speech?
Re: Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware
#38Nice. Any bits of Mycroft in here? That project just imploded and I’m still sad about it.
Imploded?
Re: Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware
#39Congratulations! This is great news! I do not see anything posted on the Home Assistant (HA) Community forums. > Configuring and building Willow for the ESP BOX is a multi-step process. We're working on improving that but for now... This is crucial as your "competitors" are ready out of the box. I believe HA can be a Google/Alexa alternative to the masses only if the "out-of-the-box" experience is comparable to the c…
Thanks! HN was my first stop (of course) - I'll be heading over there shortly to post. Oh yeah, we're well aware of how much of a "pain" getting Willow going can be. I don't like it (at all). That said, you configure and build once for your environment and then get a .bin that can be flashed to the ESP BOX with anything that does ESP flashing (like various web interfaces, etc) or you can re-run the flash command acro…
IMHO better to release early like this to a group of hackers than to wait until you have a nice out of the box setup going. This way you're going to get a lot of great feedback and hopefully some help. Awesome project!
Re: Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where can I get one? I can't find it on Ali :(
You never know if people are going to love your pet project as much as you do. We had a hunch the community would appreciate Willow but like I said, you just never know. My suspicion is Espressif (until now, hah) hasn't sold a lot of ESP Boxes. We were concerned that if Willow takes off they will sell out. That already appears to be happening. Espressif has tremendous manufacturing capacity and we hope they will scal…
I really hope so, I've been waiting for good audio assistant hardware forever. I hope this is finally the time where I ditch Alexa once and for all, thanks for releasing Willow!