Image: u/LESGuy on Reddit · Renders of the walkie-talkie enclosure and its button
A push-button ESP walkie-talkie for a home's voice assistant
A Home Assistant user built a local push-to-talk voice "walkie-talkie" on ESP hardware with Claude's help, modelled on the commercial Walkie One.
Credits
Earliest dated source:
The full story
A push-to-talk voice remote for Home Assistant, modelled on the commercial Walkie One. Its maker took apart an ESP32-S3 smart speaker bought on Amazon, kept its speaker for spoken replies and its ESP32 as the brains, added a round push button on the GPIO pins and a battery.
Claude helped along the way, mostly with designing the enclosure. Left awake so it needs one press, the battery lasts about 16 hours and is charged overnight. Home Assistant also sees the speaker as a media player, so it doubles as a small music player.
The maker's main finding is that pressing a button beats wake words: picking it up and speaking has worked every time.
How it was done
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Sources
From a short post by the maker, so the details are as they tell them.
- Reddit: Got inspired to make a local voice “walkie talkie” for my home. ESP based push button control.Reddit poster: LESGuyPosted
The maker's post in r/homeassistant.
- The project: walkieone.com
The commercial Walkie One that inspired the build.