Finding microphones that look nice, can pick up voice at high enough quality to extract commands and that cover an entire room is surprisingly hard.
If this device delivers on audio quality it's totally worth it at $59.
If this device delivers on audio quality it's totally worth it at $59.
I started using the Box-3 with heywillow which did amazing input and processing using ML on my GPU, but the speaker is aweful. I build a speaker of my own using a raspberry pi Z2W, dac and some speakers in a 3d printed enclosure I designed, and added a shim to the server so that responses came from my speaker rather than the cheap/tiny speaker in the box-3. I'll likely do the same now with the Voice PE, but I'm hoping that the grove connector can be used to plonk it on top of a higher quality speaker unit and make it into a proper music player too.
As soon as I have it in my hands, I intend to get straight to work looking at a way to modify my speaker design to become an addon "module" for the PE.
Bear in mind that a $50 google home or Alexa mini(?) is always going to be whatever google deem it to be. This is an open device which can be whatever you want it to be. That’s a lot of value in my eyes.