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

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

#111

Post by t-vi »

kkielhofner wrote: post #90
t-vi wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I plugged a Jabra conference speaker to a Raspberry and if it hears something interesting, it sends to my local GPU computer for decoding (with whisper) + answer-getting + response sent back to the Raspberry as audio (with a model from coqui-ai/TTS but using more plain PyTorch). Works really nicely for having very local weather, calendar, ...

Neat! If you don't mind my asking, what do you mean "if it hears something interesting"? Is that based on wake word, or always listen/process?

Both:

A long while ago, I wrote a little tutorial[0] on quantizing a speech commands network to the Raspberry. I used that to control lights directly and also for wake word detection.

More recently, I found that I can just use more classic VAD because my uses typically don't suffer if I turn on/off the microphone. My main goal is to not get out the mobile phone for information. That reduces the processing when I turn on the radio...

Not high-end as your solution, but nice enough for my purposes.

[0]. https://devblog.pytorchlightning.ai/applying-quantization-to...

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

#112

Post by kkielhofner »

RileyJames wrote: post #107
kkielhofner wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Music output is "on the list". Biggest fundamental issue is the speaker built in the ESP BOX is optimized for speech and not going to impress anyone playing music. That said, the ESP BOX (of course) supports bluetooth so we can definitely pair with a speaker you bring. Willow is the first of it's kind that I'm aware of to enable this kind of functionality at anything close to this price point in the open source ecosy…

Nice. I guess I don’t expect willow to cover the speaker element. I’d rather connect with my existing hifi / Bluetooth speakers. But with google I’m stuck with their integration to Spotify. It’s that component I’d like control over, and that’s why I’d use willow. That and not being spied on in my own home. Definitely keen for one.

The ESP Box with the ESP32 S3 has robust bluetooth support and I don't see A2DP/BT/pairing management/etc being that big of a lift. In full transparency it's probably towards the bottom on the priorities list ATM but the important thing is it's on the list already and it happens to be something I'm personally interested in :).

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

#113

Post by pedalpete »

I've never really used my Echo much, but they just went on sale, and I bought a bunch of them to wire up my place to play spotify across different rooms.

I'm amazed at how buggy it is, with spotify not playing regularly, etc.

I'm hoping there is a replacement that I can flash onto an echo speaker. I'd love something that just does the basics. I don't order things from Amazon or doing anything other than media with the speaker.

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

#114

Post by stavros »

pedalpete wrote: post #113

I've never really used my Echo much, but they just went on sale, and I bought a bunch of them to wire up my place to play spotify across different rooms. I'm amazed at how buggy it is, with spotify not playing regularly, etc. I'm hoping there is a replacement that I can flash onto an echo speaker. I'd love something that just does the basics. I don't order things from Amazon or doing anything other than media with th…

It has only gotten buggy recently. It used to work flawlessly for me, but in the past few months it's stopped playing songs, frequency announces it will play and then does nothing, or just forgets it can play music.

The other day it also forgot half my smart lights and has refused to rediscover them since. It's a dumpster fire now.

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

#115

Post by stavros »

kkielhofner wrote: post #52
canadiantim wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow yeah I think you're really onto something here. No one actually wants the creepiness from Echo or Alexa etc. That's what prevented me from trying any Home Assistant thing before, but I know it could be very useful if actually sensitive to privacy-concerns. Best of luck with the development! I'll definitely be following closely. Do you sell the pre-built hardware yourself?

Thanks! When you're releasing a pet project of love like this you never really know if other people are going to appreciate it as much as you do. Looking here on HN it seems like people appreciate it. We don't sell the hardware currently because: 1) Espressif has well established sales channels and distribution worldwide. 2) It's not our "business model". In my capacity as advisor to a few startups in the space I've…

We're doing healthcare and this is exactly right. Perhaps I'll be contacting you in the future!

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

#118

Post by neurobama »

What are the advantages of Whisper over a custom app running on a cheaper Andriod tablet? How much benefit is derived from the dual microphones, for instance? Are there hardware-level APIs that Whisper offers which a custom Android app wouldn't be able to access?

I don't mean to nitpick, this looks really cool. I've just got a few old tablets lying around, and I'm trying to decide whether to spring for one of these instead of trying to make something work on what I've already got.

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

#119

Post by glenngillen »

kkielhofner wrote: post #33
glenngillen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 all…

Really interesting, thanks for replying.

I think controlling the odd device, setting a timer, adding items to a shopping list covers about 90% of my Alexa use. The remaining bits are asking it to play music, or dropping into another room. Seems like a good portion of these could be covered already.

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

#120

Post by tbyehl »

What's the story for multiple devices being triggered by a single utterance of the wake word?

I have a Alexa or Google device in nearly every room so that '[wake word] lights [on|off]' or whatever does the right thing for that space. Alexa devices are pretty good about processing from the 'right' device when multiple are triggered. Google, not-so-much.

(Also a gap in both platforms is that they don't pass along the triggering device information)

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