Willow
AI
voice assistant
SHOW HN2023
How HN took it
21 positive, 43 neutral or asking, 2 mixed, 4 critical, out of 70 comments about the project. Thread score +0.20.
Idea: 11 for, 1 againstExecution: 1 for, 2 againstPricing: 1 for, 1 againstPrivacy: 1 for, 0 againstPerformance: 1 for, 0 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Impressive performance and competitive with Echo
From 1 comment
This looks amazing.
hitchstory on HN
Objections
Music playback is not supported well due to speaker
From 1 comment
Music output is "on the list". Biggest fundamental issue is the speaker built in the ESP BOX is optimized for speech and not going to impress anyone playing music. That said, the…
kkielhofner on HN
Inference server requires CUDA GPU for good performance
From 1 comment
GPU (currently CUDA only) is our primary target for our inference server implementation. It "runs" on CPU but our goal is to enable an ecosystem that is competitive with Alexa in…
kkielhofner on HN
Requests
Audio playback and TTS responses
From 2 comments
Thanks! If I'm being perfectly honest I'm surprised we got it this far already. If I wanted to be really critical: - Far-field speech is actually kind of hard. There are at least…
kkielhofner on HNWe plan to make a Home Assistant Willow component to use any of their supported TTS modules to play speech output on device. We just didn't get to it yet. Our inference server…
kkielhofner on HN
Support for streaming ASR output
From 1 comment
Whisper, per the model, does 30 second chunks and doesn't support "streaming" by the strict definition. You'll be able to see when we release our inference server implementation…
kkielhofner on HN
Questions
Whether speech commands can be used beyond light and switch control
From 1 comment
> the ESP BOX itself can recognize up to 400 commands directly on the device. That's really cool! Does this mean 400 specific commands, e.g. "turn on the living room lights" or…
michaelmior on HN
Alternatives named
Amazon Echo / Alexa
From 2 comments
Thanks! We are really, truly, and seriously committed to building a device that with support from Home Assistant and other integrations doesn't leave any reason whatsoever to buy…
kkielhofner on HNThe ESP BOX has an acoustically optimized enclosure with dual microphones for noise cancelation, separation, etc. Between that and the Espressif AFE (audio frontend interface)…
kkielhofner on HN
Home Assistant voice pipelines
From 1 comment
Hey there! First of all, everyone involved in this project has been big fans and users of HA for many years (in my case at least a decade). THANK YOU! For now Willow wouldn't do…
kkielhofner on HN