Skip to main content

New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware

Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware
512 by kkielhofner | 122 comments on Hacker News.
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://ift.tt/18TMsVh

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

New best story on Hacker News: Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) – Heat pump sold directly to homeowners

Launch HN: Electric Air (YC W23) – Heat pump sold directly to homeowners 571 by cmui | 527 comments on Hacker News. Hi HN! I’m Chris Mui, founder of Electric Air ( https://electricair.io ). We’re building a residential heat pump system. This will be an all-electric replacement for your home’s furnace and air conditioner that enables more centrally ducted installs, manages your indoor air quality, and saves you money on monthly energy bills. We also streamline purchase, finance and install by selling directly to homeowners. You can place a preorder today at https://electricair.io . Heat pumps work by using refrigerant and a compressor to move energy against a temperature gradient. If you put 1 kWh of energy into a heat pump, you get 3-5 kWh of heating in your home. But this isn’t breaking the laws of physics because heat pumps don’t make heat, they move it around. The extra 2-4kWh gets absorbed from the outdoors, even when it is cold outside. The low pressure refrigerant in the outdo...