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HeyWillow
willow
C2023–2024
HeyWillow / willow

willow

Open source, local, and self-hosted Amazon Echo/Google Home competitive Voice Assistant alternative

Security & PrivacyAI & Machine LearningSelf-hostedLearning & ReferenceHardware & EmbeddedRobotics & IoTAutomation & Workflows
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
5Distinct people
19Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Open source, local, and self-hosted Amazon Echo/Google Home competitive Voice Assistant alternative

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 2:59:58 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month19 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2023-05-15 14:13:35 UTC to 2024-01-13 23:27:31 UTC.

02462023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 2 submissions, 5 commentsMay 20232023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsSep 20232023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsJan 2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
May 20232023-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC725
Jun 20232023-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC707
Jul 20232023-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC202
Aug 20232023-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Sep 20232023-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20232023-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20232023-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Dec 20232023-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-02-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

7 sources
kkielhofner·May 23, 2023Submission

Show HN: Willow Inference Server: Optimized ASR/TTS/LLM for Willow/WebRTC/REST

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 inside of 6GB VRAM. LLM support defaults to int4 quantization (conversion scripts included). ASR/STT + TTS + Vicuna 13B require roughly 18GB VRAM. Less for 7B, of course! ASR. Heavy emphasis - Whisper optimized for very high quality as-close-to-real-time-as
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-possible speech recognition via a variety of means (Willow, WebRTC, POST a file, integration with devices and client applications, etc). Results in hundreds of milliseconds or less for most intended speech tasks. See YouTube WebRTC demo[0]. TTS. Primarily provided for assistant tasks (like Willow!) and visually impaired users. LLM. Optionally pass input through a provided/configured LLM for question answering, chatbot, and assistant tasks. Currently supports LLaMA deriviates with strong preference for Vicuna (I like 13B). Built in support for quantization to int4 to conserve GPU memory. Support for a variety of transports. REST, WebRTC, Web Sockets (primarily for LLM). Performance and memory optimized. Leverages CTranslate2 for Whisper support and AutoGPTQ for LLMs. Willow support. WIS powers the Tovera hosted best-effort example server Willow users enjoy. Support for WebRTC - stream audio in real-time from browsers or WebRTC applications to optimize quality and response time. Heavily optimized for long-running sessions using WebRTC audio track management. Leave your session open for days at a time and have self-hosted ASR transcription within hundreds of milliseconds while conserving network bandwidth and CPU! Support for custom TTS voices. With relatively small audio recordings WIS can create and manage custom TTS voices. See API documentation for more information. Much like the release of Willow[1] last week this is an early release but we had a great response from HN and are looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks! [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxCO5eONqSQ [1] - https://github.com/toverainc/willow
13 points · Open discussion
kkielhofner·May 15, 2023
The Home Assistant project (as part of the "year of voice") is working on wake word, etc for Raspberry Pi from what I understand. However, as someone who's tried to do exactly this on a Raspberry Pi before supporting wake word and getting clean audio from 25 feet away with background noise, acoustic echo, etc with a random collection of software and hardware is very challenging. I have an entire graveyard of mic arrays from seeed and others myself :). Espressif really did us all a solid with this hardware and their ADF and SR frameworks. Whether it's cost, being fully assembled and ready to go, and even wake word, AEC, AGC, BSS, NS, etc at least as of now the ESP BOX is essentially impossible to compete with in terms of hardware in the open ecosystem. I talk about this and more on our wiki pages[0] (check out "Hardware" and "Home Assistan
Read the rest
t"). In short, the Espressif frameworks we use /technically/ support the "regular" ESP32 but it's so limited (and the ESP BOX/ESP S3 is so cheap) we're not super interested in supporting it. We're aiming for an end-user experience that's competitive with Echo, Google Home, etc in every possible way - speed, quality, reliability, functionality, and cost. In fact, we want to crush them on all points to where there's no reason left to buy one of them. [0] - https://github.com/toverainc/willow/wiki/
In Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware
kkielhofner·May 15, 2023
It does for everything but the touch display because it doesn't have one[0]. We don't support the three buttons at the bottom but I have two ESP BOX Lites and we should be able to make it happen pretty easily. We haven't been focused on the ESP BOX Lite because it seems kind of limited. However, Espressif hasn't sold many of these things since release and judging from people looking for stock, etc in this thread I think that's about to change. Espressif has incredible manufacturing capacity and our hope is they will ramp up manufacture of the ESP BOX family now because (to my knowledge) Willow is the first project that actually makes meaningful use of them. The only gaiting component of the ESP BOX family that I can see is the plastic enclosure. I'm sure Espressif can figure out how to crank these things out ;). [0] - https://github.com/t
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overainc/willow/wiki/Hardware
In Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware
kkielhofner·May 15, 2023
Thanks! HN was my first stop (of course) - I'll be heading over there shortly to post. Oh yeah, we're well aware of how much of a "pain" getting Willow going can be. I don't like it (at all). That said, you configure and build once for your environment and then get a .bin that can be flashed to the ESP BOX with anything that does ESP flashing (like various web interfaces, etc) or you can re-run the flash command across X devices. So even now, in this early stage, it's at least only painful once ;). Down the road we want to have a Willow Home Assistant component that does everything inside of the HA dashboard so users (like esphome, maybe even using esphome) can point-click-configure-flash entirely from the HA dashboard. Not to mention ongoing dynamic configuration, over the air updates, etc. I talk about all of this on our wiki[0]. [0] -
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https://github.com/toverainc/willow/wiki/Home-Assistant
In Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware
kkielhofner·May 15, 2023
I talk about this a bit on the wiki[0] but our goal is to have a Willow Home Assistant component do the Willow specific stuff and enable users to use any of the STT/TTS modules provided by Home Assistant. We'll also (likely) be creating our own TTS/STT HA component for our inference server that does some special/unique things to support Willow. [0] - https://github.com/toverainc/willow/wiki/Home-Assistant
In Show HN: Willow – Open-source privacy-focused voice assistant hardware
kkielhofner·May 15, 2023Submission

Show HN: 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 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 recogni
Read the rest
zed 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
581 points · Open discussion

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