Willow's $50 open-source voice assistant drew 581 HN points, 3.1k stars

Willow is an open-source voice assistant for the home: firmware and software that turn Espressif's ~$50 ESP BOX boards — touch LCD, dual microphones, speaker and enclosure included — into Alexa/Echo-style devices wired to Home Assistant. Speech commands can be recognized entirely on the device, up to 400 defined commands via Espressif's Multinet model, or streamed to an inference server the user runs themselves, so nothing has to leave the house.

The project came from HN user kkielhofner, who said he loved Home Assistant, had always thought the ESP BOX hardware was cool, and finally started building on it during what Home Assistant had declared 'the year of voice.' His pitch was explicitly anti-Alexa: it should not be 'creepy' — voice goes to a self-hosted server or stays on the device — and it should not hassle or try to sell you things. At $50 all-in he argued there were no compromises on looks, quality, accuracy, speed or cost. This was Willow's first and very early release, built by a two-person team.

The 2023-05-15 Show HN drew 581 points and 138 comments. In-thread the founder defended the 'Alexa competitive' claim: far-field speech held up against background noise at up to 30 feet, local command recognition was near-instant, and a highly optimized Whisper-based inference server was planned for open source the following week. Commenters compared Willow with the imploded Mycroft project and asked about TTS output and latency; one posted that the project had been picked up by Ars Technica, another that ESP BOX boards sold out everywhere after the post hit Hacker News.

By the 2026-09-05 crawl the repository (toverainc/willow, now redirecting to the HeyWillow org) showed 3.1k stars, 128 forks and 1,000 commits, with the README announcing the released Willow Inference Server, documentation on heywillow.io, and users starting to receive their hardware.