The ESP32-S3-BOX-3 is an ideal Voice Assistant for use with Home Assistant.
It can be flashed with ESPHome to create your own local and private Voice Assistant. It also has the capability to process the wake word on the device itself using "Micro Wake Word", speeding up recognition time.
The ESP32-S3-BOX-3 is based on Espressif’s ESP32-S3 Wi-Fi + Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC, with AI acceleration capabilities. In addition to ESP32-S3’s 512KB SRAM, ESP32-S3-BOX-3 comes with 16MB of Quad flash and 16MB of Octal PSRAM.
The device comes with 4 different bases, 2 of which are more development bases exposing GPIO pins of the ESP32 device. One of the bases can house an 18650 battery and contains sensors including Temperature, Humidity, IR emitter, IR receiver and a Micro SD card slot. The 4 included bases are called:
- ESP32-S3-BOX-3-DOCK
- ESP32-S3-BOX-3-SENSOR
- ESP32-S3-BOX-3-BRACKET
- ESP32-S3-BOX-3-BREAD
The voice integration in Home Assistant is still very new and so expect more of the capabilities of this device to be taken advantage of over time, in particular using the screen for useful information such as sensor data.
It has 3 programmable buttons and GPIO pins available if you wish to add more sensors.
You are responsible for flashing the device yourself with the desired firmware. How you configure the firmware will determine what functionality is available to you. Here is a link to easily flash your device with ESPHome: https://esphome.io/projects/.
There is some useful Home Assistant documentation here: https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/s3_box_voice_assistant/
Note that this description is not exhaustive of all of its functionality. For more details visit this Espressif article: https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP32-S3-BOX-3.
