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 – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware launched on May 15, 2023 with 581 votes, #19 of 4,910 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 3 years on.
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
Open source, local, and self-hosted Amazon Echo/Google Home competitive Voice Assistant alternative - HeyWillow/willow
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…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
Willow: the fastest and most private open source voice assistant2023 · heywillow.io · ▲12Hey 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 on IOSNov 2025 · apps.apple.com · ▲395Write 5x faster with voice dictation now Available on iOS
Willow Frontier ProJul 2026 · willowvoice.com · ▲292Hey 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.
Home Assistant Voice2024 · home-assistant.io · ▲200A open, local, and private voice assistant for your home
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