An AI voice assistant on $10 of hardware

Before the chronicle existed I wanted to know how cheap a talking assistant could get. Answer: an ESP32 board, a mic, a speaker, about ten dollars total.

It listens for a wake word, records, sends the audio to a model, and speaks the answer back. Embedded C++ on one end, cloud inference on the other. Nothing about it is revolutionary; the point was holding it in my hand. A voice assistant used to be a product from a trillion-dollar company. Now it's a weekend and a microcontroller.

This one is cerrado: it works, I moved on. The code is on GitHub if you want to build one.