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…
In plain words
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 cancellation, and high-quality audio for approximately $50, featuring a touch LCD display, dual microphones, and speaker. The device processes voice commands either locally on the hardware or through a self-hosted inference server, providing privacy-focused voice control without sending audio to external cloud services.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
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 microphones, speaker, enclosure, buttons, etc it can be bought today for $50 all-in. - It's ready to go. Take it out of the box, flash with Willow, put it somewhere. - It's not creepy. Voice is either sent to a self-hosted inference server or commands are recognized locally on the ESP BOX. - It doesn't hassle or try to sell you. If I hear "Did you know?" one more time from Alexa I think I'm going to lose it. - It's open source. - It's capable. This is the first "release" of Willow and I don't think we've even begun scratching the surface of what the hardware and software components are capable of. - 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! - It still does cool maker stuff. With 16 GPIOs exposed on the back of the enclosure there are all kinds of interesting possibilities. This is the first (and VERY early) release but we're really interested to hear what HN thinks! [0] - https://github.com/espressif/esp-box
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