What Willow is (and isn't)

Willow itself is not a complete and direct replacement for Amazon Echo/Google Home. Willow has a fairly limited focus:

• Support wake word to start recording.
• Use VAD to know when you stop talking.
• Get the cleanest, highest quality audio possible.
• Do something useful with the audio (stream to a server for speech to text or use local command recognition).
• Send the output text to something to do actually do something.
• Display the command results (and in the future) play back any audio that comes back from the command server (such as text to speech output).
• Provide an interface for feedback via the LCD display and speaker output.

That's it!

See the Home Assistant section on this wiki for more details on what really does the heavy lifting here.