22nd of 51 in VoiceFor voice, speech and music
xiaozhi-esp32
ESP32 firmware for a voice chatbot with MCP device and cloud tool control
- Stars
- 31.7k
- License
- MIT
- Last commit
- Oct 2026
- Last release
- Oct 2026
- Language
- C++
Missed the latest GitHub check; these facts may be older.
Overview
C++ firmware that turns ESP32 boards into a voice chatbot. It does offline wake-word detection with ESP-SR and streams Opus audio over WebSocket or MQTT+UDP to a server that handles ASR, LLM and TTS. MCP is used on the device (speaker, LED, servo, GPIO) and in the cloud (smart home, email, search). It connects to the hosted xiaozhi.me server by default, and self-hosted server projects are listed.
Who it is for: Hardware hobbyists and embedded engineers building ESP32 voice assistants
Ranked among open-source alternatives to ElevenLabs (#2 of 10) and Otter.ai (#2 of 10).
Strengths
- Supports 138 board directories and 171 release variants across ESP32, C3, C5, C6, S3 and P4
- Documented WebSocket and MQTT+UDP protocols let third-party servers and clients interoperate
- Offline wake-word detection with customizable wake words; Wi-Fi, Ethernet and Cat.1 4G networking
- Prebuilt firmware can be flashed without setting up a development environment
Weaknesses
- Models do not run on the device; a server is needed for ASR, LLM and TTS
- Default setup depends on the hosted xiaozhi.me service and an account
- Requires ESP-IDF 6.0.1 or later; 5.x is unsupported and the v6.1 tag has a reported C3 Wi-Fi bug
- Beginner tutorials are on Feishu and bilibili, mostly in Chinese
What it needs
- no GPU
- Needs ESP-IDF 6.0.1+, ESP32 board, xiaozhi.me or compatible server
- Models: Qwen, DeepSeek, Realtime end-to-end voice models
Head to head
Also in Voice
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|---|---|---|
| 1 | voicestudioDesktop app for voice cloning, dubbing and dictation with local speech models | 83 out of 100 |
| 3 | whisper.cppC/C++ port of OpenAI Whisper for local speech-to-text transcription | 78 out of 100 |
| #4 | VoiceboxLocal voice studio for cloning, TTS, dictation and agent speech | 71 out of 100 |
| #5 | buzzOffline desktop app for transcribing and translating audio with Whisper | 71 out of 100 |
| #6 | whisperlivekitReal-time streaming speech-to-text server with diarization and translation | 71 out of 100 |