In the last couple of weeks (presumably driven by the release of Deepseek), a number of low cost ESP32 voice assistants have arrived, eg.,
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008600891141.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008634826817.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005008634051137.html
Has anyon e tried any of those and any comments on how well they work or even how far we are from using them with ESPHome and microwakeword?
Interesting … looks good … based on ESP32-S3 (like the Voice Assist PE) so in theory shouldn’t be too hard to run ESPHome.
Interesting. I’ve bought one. Will have a play and report back.
Which one did you get?
I’ll be very interested to hear, sadly currently lack the time to go and hack at them…
The one in the first link. Thought it looked the best. Haven’t received it yet though.
OK. So I got this device: DeepSeek XiaoZhi AI Voice Chat Robot ESP32-S3 1.28 inch LCD N16R8 Development Board Astronaut Clock Desktop Ornament - AliExpress 7
It appears that the documentation for this device is available here: Moji 小智AI衍生版 - 立创开源硬件平台
This is very useful as it provides all of the pinouts etc.
I have successfully installed ESPHome on the device. All the standard stuff works, like wifi, ota etc, but in terms of device specific hardware I have thus far only managed to get the backlight to work. The display is listed as a GC9A01 display, but none of the various permutations I have tried have yielded any results. If anyone knows which ESPHome component I should be using with this display I would be most grateful. In the meantime, I’ll continue with my trial and error approach. Is there a better way? Advice from googling and asking Copilot has thus far proved incorrect.