33rd of 62 in VoiceFor voice, speech and music
xiaozhi-esp32
ESP32 firmware for a voice chatbot with MCP device and cloud tool control
- Stars
- 31.9k
- License
- MIT
- Last commit
- Oct 2026
- Last release
- Oct 2026
- Language
- C++
25,011 on 3 Apr 202631,851 on 23 Oct 2026
From GitHub's daily star counts.
Checked on GitHub.
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 (#3 of 10) and Otter.ai (#4 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
- Docker
- Needs ESP-IDF 6.0.1+, ESP32 board, xiaozhi.me or compatible server
- Models: Qwen, DeepSeek, Realtime end-to-end voice models
Quick answers
Is xiaozhi-esp32 open source?
Yes. Its code is on GitHub under the MIT license.
Can you run xiaozhi-esp32 with Docker?
Yes. Its repository has a Docker setup: a Dockerfile, a Compose file or a published image.
Does xiaozhi-esp32 need a GPU?
No, it runs without one.
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