AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Willow: the fastest and most private open source voice assistant
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…
Willow is an open source voice assistant platform built on affordable hardware that runs locally without cloud dependency. Designed for users concerned about privacy and data collection, it offers faster performance… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Willow: the fastest and most private open source voice assistant launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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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…
2023 · github.com · 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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A fast, open-source voice assistant powered by Groq, Cartesia, and Vercel.
2024 · swift-ai.vercel.app · 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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Voiceflow▲607Build voice apps in your browser without coding
2019 · voiceflow.com · its alternatives →
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Google Home▲669Google's Alexa competitor, an in-home voice assistant
2016 · home.google.com · its alternatives →
- 8
A open, local, and private voice assistant for your home
2024 · home-assistant.io · its alternatives →
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Amazon Polly▲337Turn text into lifelike speech using deep learning
2016 · aws.amazon.com · 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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I've been obsessed for the past ~year with the possibilities of talking to LLMs. I built a bunch of one-off prototypes, shared code on X, started a Meetup group in SF, and co-hosted a big hackathon. It turns out that there are a few low-level problems that everybody building conversational/real-time AI needs to solve on the way to building/shipping something that works well: low-latency media transport, echo cancellation, voice activity detection, phrase endpointing, pipelining data between models/services, handling voice interruptions, swapping out different…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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The first AI-powered voice assistant with privacy
2017 · snips.ai · its alternatives →
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Premium AI voice quality without the premium price tag.
2025 · async.com · 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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Whispering▲195Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
2025 · epicenter.so · its alternatives →
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Amazon's assistant w/ improved voice recognition and design
2016 · amazon.com · its alternatives →
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Amazon Echo competitor with Alexa inside
2017 · lenovo.com · its alternatives →
- 23
The hipster cat voice assistant for Alexa and Google 😸
2018 · amazon.com · 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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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 →