esp-web-tools VS esp-box

Some feedback to make your project easier to install and integrate better with Home Assistant (I'm the founder):

Home Assistant is building a voice assistant as part of our Year of the Voice theme. https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/04/27/year-of-the-vo...

As part of our recent chapter 2 milestone, we introduced new Assist Pipelines. This allows users to configure multiple voice assistants. Your project is using the old "conversation" API. Instead it should use our new assist pipelines API. Docs: https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/voice/pipelines/

You can even off-load the STT and TTS fully to Home Assistant and only focus on wake words.

You will see a lot higher adoption rate if users can just buy the ESP BOX and install the software on it without installing/compiling stuff. That's exactly why we created ESP Web Tools. It offers projects to offer browser-based installation directly from their website. https://esphome.github.io/esp-web-tools/

If you're going the ESP Web Tools route (and you should!), we've also created Improv Wi-Fi, a small protocol to configure Wi-Fi on the ESP device. This will allow ESP Web Tools to offer an onboarding wizard in the browser once the software has been installed. More info at https://www.improv-wifi.com/

Good luck!

Note: if anyone else wants to make an installer website like this, it’s called ESP Web Tools and open source: https://esphome.github.io/esp-web-tools/

ESP Web Tools uses WebSerial to allow users to install, update and manage firmware running on ESP microcontrollers: https://esphome.github.io/esp-web-tools/

If you want to make the project even more accessible, consider setting up a GitHub pages with ESP Web Tools: https://esphome.github.io/esp-web-tools/

Instead of esptool suggestions, use ESP web tools and your whole flow can be web based. https://esphome.github.io/esp-web-tools/

Sure!

That's actually another great thing about the ESP BOX - the hardware is open as well. Schematics, BOM, Gerbers, etc have been made available by Espressif[0].

We don't currently have plans to get too involved on the hardware side but that could certainly change down the road.

[0] - https://github.com/espressif/esp-box/tree/master/hardware/es...

Couldn't set it up seems due to old firmware, i followed firmware upgrade guide from github but the process gets stuck at random intervals using ESP Launchpad or just doesn't do anything using Flash Download tool and the Esp Box shows black screen now, not sure if its dead.

I recently purchased the esp32-s3-box from espressif. It’s really a dev board, so not a complete out-of-the-box solution, but I think it really has some potential. https://github.com/espressif/esp-box