The ESPHome, Home Assistant, and Willow projects have all been hard at work to bring our goals of privacy, user choice, and freedom to the world of home automation and voice assistants.
Voice assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home are nice. You know what's even better? A voice assistant that doesn't involve these creepy big tech companies that are doing who-knows-what with our sensitive and private data.
One of the challenges with voice assistants is the hardware available in the real world. ESPHome, Home Assistant, and Willow are volunteer and community-oriented open source projects. We don't have the ability to mass-manufacture the voice assistant hardware we all need to get rid of the creepy big tech stuff once and for all.
Thankfully Espressif has answered the call with their amazing ESP-BOX-3. The ESP-BOX-3 comes in the perfect package to pair with ESPHome, Home Assistant, and Willow. For roughly $50 USD we can finally have it all - capable, flexible, and "ready for the kitchen counter" open-source voice assistant hardware that still exposes the maker stuff (GPIO, etc) we all know and love!
The ESP-BOX-3 is shipping now with a beautiful teal base. You know what the problem is with giving people everything? We want more!
Thankfully, Espressif has graciously offered to potentially make the ESP-BOX-3 available in different color schemes to meet our preferences and kick the competitiveness with the big tech voice assistants up a notch. We have the unique and fantastic opportunity to help them bring their ample hardware and manufacturing expertise to our communities and the world at large.
Let's all help Espressif to better understand what we're looking for in ESP-BOX-3 design and aesthetics by participating in this poll! We will collect these responses, provide them to Espressif, and give updates along the way.
Say good riddance to big tech and hello to ESPHome, Home Assistant, and Willow!