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Alex: ESP32 voice assistant with puppy eyes

A bare ESP32 voice assistant with animated OLED eyes.

Full build guide

Alex: ESP32 voice assistant with puppy eyes
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By jayesh_nawani

View original on hackster.io
Posted

Build sheet

Board
ESP32-D0WD-V3
Other parts
INMP441 I2S mic, MAX98357A amp + 3W speaker, SSD1306 0.96" OLED
AI model or service
OpenAI Whisper STT, GPT-4o-mini, OpenAI TTS
Difficulty
Beginner

Overview

Bare ESP32 (no PSRAM) + INMP441 mic + MAX98357A speaker + SSD1306 OLED. Records on volume trigger, Whisper+GPT+TTS via OpenAI APIs, streams PCM to the amp, and animates FreeRTOS-pinned puppy eyes (listen/think/speak/error) on core 0. Covered by Adafruit Blog.

How it works

Volume-triggered recording goes to OpenAI Whisper, GPT-4o-mini and TTS; PCM streams to the amp while a FreeRTOS task animates the eyes.

Hardware

  • ESP32-D0WD-V3
  • INMP441 I2S mic
  • MAX98357A amp + 3W speaker
  • SSD1306 0.96" OLED

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