Willow

by Willow

Open-source privacy-respecting voice assistant for home automation.

TL;DR

Open-source privacy-respecting voice assistant for home automation.

Best for self-hosters replacing Alexa or Google Home with a local-first voice assistant. Pricing: free.

Category
Open source
License
—
Stars
—
Last push
—
Pricing
free
Platforms
Linux, Edge

What it is

Willow is an open-source voice assistant project from Tovera designed for ESP32-S3 BOX hardware. It pairs with Willow Inference Server (local Whisper + LLM) or cloud backends to run a private, low-latency home voice assistant. Included here as a reference for OSS voice-agent designs at the device edge.

Best for: Self-hosters replacing Alexa or Google Home with a local-first voice assistant.
Watch out for: ESP32-S3 BOX hardware required; not a general business voice-AI platform.

Features

Speaker diarizationNo
Word-level timestampsNo
Streaming / real-timeNo
Languages supportedNone
HIPAA eligibleNo

Willow vs Whipscribe

FeatureWillowWhipscribe
CategoryOpen sourceTranscription APIs
Pricingfreefree beta
Speaker diarization—Yes
Word timestamps—Yes
Streaming—No
Languages—99
PlatformsLinux, EdgeWeb, API, MCP

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Whipscribe is a managed faster-whisper + whisperX service. If you want transcripts without running infrastructure, paste a URL or drop a file in the form below — you'll have a transcript in seconds.