I cannot stress enough what a gift the ESP BOX and Espressif component libraries are to Willow. As anyone who's dealt with it can tell you wake word detection (while minimizing false wake) and getting clean speech with acoustic echo, background noise, etc from 30ft away is still a fairly hard problem. I've been pretty deep in this space for a while and I'm not aware of anything even close to approaching open source that is even remotely competitive with the Espressif SR+AFE implementations. The ESP BOX has also been acoustically tuned by Espressif to address all of the weird enclosure issues with audio. Their AFE+SR interface has been tested and certified by Amazon themselves for use in Alexa ecosystem devices. It's truly excellent.
Espressif has an excellent track record for VERY long term hardware and software support and if anything we're on the very early bleeding edge of what the hardware and software components are capable of. As one example, we're using the ESP SR wake and local command support released by Espressif last week!
I cannot stress enough what a gift the ESP BOX and Espressif component libraries are to Willow. As anyone who's dealt with it can tell you wake word detection (while minimizing false wake) and getting clean speech with acoustic echo, background noise, etc from 30ft away is still a fairly hard problem. I've been pretty deep in this space for a while and I'm not aware of anything even close to approaching open source that is even remotely competitive with the Espressif SR+AFE implementations. The ESP BOX has also been acoustically tuned by Espressif to address all of the weird enclosure issues with audio. Their AFE+SR interface has been tested and certified by Amazon themselves for use in Alexa ecosystem devices. It's truly excellent.
Espressif has an excellent track record for VERY long term hardware and software support and if anything we're on the very early bleeding edge of what the hardware and software components are capable of. As one example, we're using the ESP SR wake and local command support released by Espressif last week!