Check out Koala Satellite, the next step of evolution for this project!

What is it

This repository contains example code to integrate Seeed Respeaker Lite Voice Kit (with XIAO ESP32-S3 on board) with ESPHome. I'm thankful for continuous help of ESPHome team and Seeed developers, that let me put this thing together. It's using official code for Voice Preview Edition by ESPHome team, as well as firmware and guides from Seeed Wiki and their repository for Respeaker.

*Disclaimer

Use this on your own risk. Expect breaking changes.

Although Voice PE is released, parts of its code are still under active development. I will try to update YAML and XMOS board firmware as soon as i can, but it can't be instantenuous... If you encounter a problem, before creating ticket here you may go to PE and Seeed repos, linked above, and see if something changed there. I'll gladly accept pull-requests. :)

Why?

I completely abandoned proprietary assistants in the Summer of 2024 and fully committed to Assist all-hands. With this board i finally can build device, that will satisfy me and (more important) my family as their trusted voice assistant.

What to do with it?

* Thanks to Mike aka @mikey60 and his fork to nabu_microphone, this project is using 48kHz sample rate for better music playback quality.*

1. Get Respeaker Lite with ESP32 soldered to it (you may solder it yourself, pins on the back can remain dry, they're not used).
2. Solder USR to D2 and MUTE to D3 pins. ATTENTION! This step is mandatory, as without it the buttons on satellite won't work as intended.
3. Flash 48kHz I2S firmware of version not lower than 1.1.0 to the XMOS board (pay attention to USB port, you need the main board port, not ESP32 one). Make sure you're using 48kHz version, as 16kHz version won't work with this repo. You can use included firmware file to be sure.
4. Flash ESPHome firmware (YAML included, place /config/common/respeaker-satellite-base.yaml into ESPHome common directory, and adjust /config/respeaker-satellite-dashboard-example.yaml to your needs) to ESP32 (use its port).
5. Add device to Home Assistant.

Here are also some useful blueprints to use with your satellite

Current abilities

The device has feature parity with Voice PE. Pretty much everything works same way, except volume control (solved in Koala Satellite). There are some additional things i've added for convenience:

• switches to turn off button sounds, mute/unmute sounds;
• sensors for next device timer properties (time is updated once per 5 sec, name is available if set);
• TTS URI event esphome.tts_uri, sent to Home Assistant every time there's voice response (check out example automation to redirect response to other media player here);
• STT text event esphome.stt_text, sent every time there's text of response available (you may use it to display readable response on your dashboard, for example);
• daily alarm functionality, read more on it here.

DFU software auto-update

Since version 2025.2.2, the firmware includes corresponding DFU firmware for Respeaker Lite board. On first start after update, new firmware will be installed to Respeaker automatically. You will see Respeaker LED flashing yellow, while installing, and green on successful install. So now there's no need to update DFU firmware. Woohoo!

Casing

I made some casing to improve family approval factor. Check it out.