? Max9814 is a microphone preamp with AGC its external to the ESP32 as the internal ADC is just pretty bad.
Max9814 with an I2S ADC should work better than most as its an analogue preamp and AGC than just quantising small signals into blocky signals with a straight digital mic.
I use them with usb soundcards on the Pi and they do farfield much better as most mics are setup for a broadcast distance of <0.3m
I’m not sure what the difference is yet completely but I hear you. I’ll read up on these two different types you mentioned asap so I can get this one running. I also have a voice assistant unit I’m working on I can you with that is from an everything smart home year of the voice tutorial. It uses a external mic, amp, and an esp32 s3 dev board because it is fast enough to process on the device or something like that.
Max9814 is pure analogue, but a great chip.
I don’t think HA uses the Esspressif IDF which as far as I know only has the vector optimisation of the esp32-s3.
Without that its not much faster than a standard esp32-s3 with DSP/ML can be 10x faster