When you're releasing a pet project of love like this you never really know if other people are going to appreciate it as much as you do. Looking here on HN it seems like people appreciate it.
We don't sell the hardware currently because:
1) Espressif has well established sales channels and distribution worldwide.
2) It's not our "business model". In my capacity as advisor to a few startups in the space I've been approached by various commercial entities that want a hardware voice interface they fully control. In healthcare, for example, there are all kinds of interesting audio and speech applications but NO ONE, and I mean NO ONE is going to be ok with seeing an Echo in their doctor's office. That's where an ESP BOX or custom manufactured hardware and Willow come in.
Our business model is to combine our soon to be released very high performance inference and API server with Willow to support these commercial applications (and home users with HA, of course). In all but a few identified and very limited cases all work will come back to the open source projects like our inference server and Willow.
When you're releasing a pet project of love like this you never really know if other people are going to appreciate it as much as you do. Looking here on HN it seems like people appreciate it.
We don't sell the hardware currently because:
1) Espressif has well established sales channels and distribution worldwide.
2) It's not our "business model". In my capacity as advisor to a few startups in the space I've been approached by various commercial entities that want a hardware voice interface they fully control. In healthcare, for example, there are all kinds of interesting audio and speech applications but NO ONE, and I mean NO ONE is going to be ok with seeing an Echo in their doctor's office. That's where an ESP BOX or custom manufactured hardware and Willow come in.
Our business model is to combine our soon to be released very high performance inference and API server with Willow to support these commercial applications (and home users with HA, of course). In all but a few identified and very limited cases all work will come back to the open source projects like our inference server and Willow.