Title: As the Home Assistant project says, it&#x27;s the year of voice!<p>I love Home Assistant and I&#x27;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&#x27;s actually &quot;Alexa&#x2F;Echo competitive&quot;. 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&#x27;s cheap. With a touch LCD display, dual microphones, speaker, enclosure, buttons, etc it can be bought today for $50 all-in.<p>- It&#x27;s ready to go. Take it out of the box, flash with Willow, put it somewhere.<p>- It&#x27;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&#x27;t hassle or try to sell you. If I hear &quot;Did you know?&quot; one more time from Alexa I think I&#x27;m going to lose it.<p>- It&#x27;s open source.<p>- It&#x27;s capable. This is the first &quot;release&quot; of Willow and I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;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&#x27;re really interested to hear what HN thinks!<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;espressif&#x2F;esp-box">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;espressif&#x2F;esp-box</a>
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