AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware
As the Home Assistant project says, it's the year of voice! 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…
Willow is an open-source voice assistant hardware project built on the ESP BOX platform, designed to work with Home Assistant and other systems. It offers wake word detection, voice activity detection, echo… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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Hey HN! Voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home have sold hundreds of millions of devices. Unfortunately, they come with less-than-ideal things like an always on microphone (doing who knows what), data collection, and limited integration options. Echo devices especially also end up being advertising billboards you pay for and install in your own home. No thanks, I've already heard of the Barbie movie... Willow is an open source hardware and supporting software voice assistant platform. For $50 Willow hardware (from Espressif) is competitive with commercial products in every regard…
2023 · heywillow.io · its alternatives →
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Willow on IOS▲395Write 5x faster with voice dictation now Available on iOS
Nov 2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN! We were part of YC S24, ended up pivoting around. Made dictation that worked really well, and decided to go all in on agentic. We've done two major things. 1. Scribe is a revamp of our product. Continually learns your style (can get into details if comments want). TLDR; we fingerprint based off your edits, and make dictation sound more and more like you. Post-trained Llama 3.1 8b. 2. Dictation is completely free. Unlimited unpersonalized dictation for everyone.
Jul 2026 · willowvoice.com · its alternatives →
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A open, local, and private voice assistant for your home
2024 · home-assistant.io · its alternatives →
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The first AI-powered voice assistant with privacy
2017 · snips.ai · its alternatives →
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Hey HN! Braden here, creator of Whispering, an open-source speech-to-text app. I really like dictation. For years, I relied on transcription tools that were almost good, but they were all closed-source. Even a lot of them that claimed to be “local” or “on-device” were still black boxes that left me wondering where my audio really went. So I built Whispering. It’s open-source, local-first, and most importantly, transparent with your data. Your data is stored locally on your device, and your audio goes directly from your machine to a local provider (Whisper C++, Speaches, etc.) or your chosen…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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A fast, open-source voice assistant powered by Groq, Cartesia, and Vercel.
2024 · swift-ai.vercel.app · its alternatives →
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Lemon▲299Voice-Powered AI Agent That Turns Voice Into Done Tasks
Mar 2026 · heylemon.ai · its alternatives →
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Welcome to Project S.A.T.U.R.D.A.Y. This is a project that allows anyone to easily build their own self-hosted J.A.R.V.I.S-like voice assistant. In my mind vocal computing is the future of human-computer interaction and by open sourcing this code I hope to expedite us on that path. I have had a blast working on this so far and I'm excited to continue to build with it. It uses whisper.cpp [1], Coqui TTS [2] and OpenAI [3] to do speech-to-text, text-to-text and text-to-speech inference all 100% locally (except for text-to-text). In the future I plan to swap out OpenAI for llama.cpp [4]. It is…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Najva▲147Your free AI-powered voice assistant for Mac
2024 · bardiakhosravi.gumroad.com · its alternatives →
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Local voice chatbot for engaging conversations, powered by Ollama, Hugging Face Transformers, and Coqui TTS Toolkit - mezbaul-h/june
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN! Willow Inference Server (WIS) is a focused and highly optimized language inference server implementation. Our goal is to "automagically" enable performant, cost-effective self-hosting of released state of the art/best of breed models to enable speech and language tasks: Primarily targeting CUDA (works on CPU too) with support for low-end (cheap) devices such as the Tesla P4, GTX 1060, and up. Don't worry - it screams on an RTX 4090 too! (See benchmarks on Github). Memory optimized - all three default Whisper (base, medium, large-v2) models loaded simultaneously with TTS support…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Our goal with this project is to build a completely open source, state of the art turn detection model that can be used in any voice AI application. I've been experimenting with LLM voice conversations since GPT-4 was first released. (There's a previous front page Show HN about Pipecat, the open source voice AI orchestration framework I work on. [1]) It's been almost two years, and for most of that time, I've been expecting that someone would "solve" turn detection. We all built initial, pretty good 80/20 versions of turn detection on top of VAD (voice activity detection) models. And…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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VibeSonic▲64Not just dictation and private AI voice toolkit
Apr 2026 · vibesonic.ai · its alternatives →
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Stet▲68Smart open-source dictation that sounds like you, not AI.
Apr 2026 · stet.me · its alternatives →
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WhisperAPI▲77$0.15/hr audio transcription API powered by OpenAI Whisper
2022 · whisperapi.com · its alternatives →
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Edith▲86An open-source voice assistant for vscode
2020 · marketplace.visualstudio.com · its alternatives →
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VoicePad AI▲53Offline voice dictation for Windows, Mac, iOS & Android
Jul 2026 · voicepad.tech · its alternatives →
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Sayonic▲71A voice assistant in your Mac's notch that does the task
22d ago · sayonic.app · its alternatives →
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SpeakoFlow▲95Free, open-source voice dictation and AI assistant, offline
Aug 2026 · speakoflow.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →