As the voice assistant seem to get more interesting for Home Assistant generally, I was wondering if there are already some ideas to integrate microphones like the INMP441?
Your post got me looking into integrating microphones with ESPhome and looking at what was already out there. Espressif has some audio development boards with microphones and speaker support. They also have examples with audio processing, wake word detection, and basic speech recognition. The speech recognition is on device and requires an ESP32S3 processor. I got one of the dev modules and managed to get the speech recognition example program working. Getting all the Espressif components integrated with ESPHome to implement speech recognition might be achievable. As a proof of concept, I managed to merge the source files generated for a ESPHome configuration for the dev module with the speech recognition example program. Still a work in progress but functional: