Hey there!
First of all, everyone involved in this project has been big fans and users of HA for many years (in my case at least a decade). THANK YOU! For now Willow wouldn't do anything other than light up a display and sit there without Home Assistant.
We will support the pipelines API and make it a configuration option (eventually default). HA has very rapid release cycles and as you note this is very new. At least for the time being we like the option of people being able to point Willow at older installs and have it "do something" today without requiring an HA upgrade that may or may not include breaking changes - hence the conversation API.
One of our devs is a contributor for esphome and we're heading somewhere in that direction, and he's a big fan of improv :).
We have plans for a Willow HA component and we'd love to run some ideas past the team. Conceptually, in my mind, we'll get to:
- Flashing and initial configuration from HA like esphome (possibly using esphome, but the Espressif ADF/SR/LCD/etc frameworks appear to be quite a ways out for esphome).
- Configuration for all Willow parameters from wifi to local speech commands in the HA dashboard, with dynamic and automatic updates for everything including local speech commands.
- OTA update support.
- TTS and STT components for our inference server implementation. These will (essentially) be very thin proxies for Willow but also enable use of TTS and STT functionality throughout HA.
- Various latency improvements. As the somewhat hasty and lame demo video illustrates[0] we're already "faster" than Alexa while maintaining Alexa competitive wake word, voice activity detection, noise suppression, far-field speech quality, accuracy, etc. With local command recognition on the Willow device and my HA install using Wemo switches (completely local) it's almost "you can't really believe it" fast and accurate.
I should be absolutely clear on something for all - our goal is to be the best hardware voice interface in the world (open source or otherwise) that happens to work very well with Home Assistant. Our goal is not to be a Home Assistant Voice Assistant. I hope that distinction makes at least a little sense.
You and the team are doing incredible work on that goal and while there is certainly some overlap we intend to maintain broad usability and compatibility with just about any platform (home automation, open source, closed source, commercial, whatever) someone may want to use Willow with.
In fact, our "monetization strategy" (to the extent we have one) is based on the various commercial opportunities I've been approached with over the years. Turns out no one wants to see an Amazon Echo in a doctor's office but healthcare is excited about voice (as one example) :).
Essentially, Home Assistant support in Willow will be one of the many integration modules we support, with Willow using as many bog-standard common denominator compliant protocols and transports that don't compromise our goals, while maintaining broad compatibility with just about any integration someone wants to use with Willow.
This is the very early initial release of Willow. We're happy for "end-users" to use it but we don't see the one-time configuration and build step being a huge blocker for our current target user - more technical early adopters who can stand a little pain ;).
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ETQaLfoImc