An AI Assistant That Wants You to See What Makes It Tick

Electronics aren’t usually meant to stick out in product designs. They are hidden inside enclosures that give them the right look for sitting on a bookshelf or hanging on a wall. A smart speaker may be all PCBs, microcontrollers, microphone arrays, and speakers on the inside, but on the outside, it is a blend of fabric, plastic, or wood designed to disappear into a room's decor.

This isn’t a mistake, of course — it’s the look most people want. But not all. Those of us interested in hardware appreciate seeing what makes our devices tick and view internal components through a different lens. A well-designed circuit board has a beauty all its own.

That’s how Pro maker 101 felt about his latest AI voice assistant build, so he decided to prominently display the hardware, rather than hiding it in a case. If you would like to build one for yourself, a step-by-step build guide is available. Best of all, the components are all highly accessible and very inexpensive.

All you will need is a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32S3 development board, a 0.96-inch OLED display module, a MAX98357A audio amplifier, a MEMS microphone, a step-up boost converter and charging module, a speaker, and a 3.7V lithium-ion battery. The components are installed on a custom PCB, which slots into a 3D-printed case that leaves the entire topside of the PCB visible.

To turn this hardware into an AI assistant, the xiaozhi-esp32 firmware was loaded onto the XIAO ESP32S3. This is an MCP-based chatbot optimized for use with ESP32 microcontrollers. It uses their native Wi-Fi support to forward requests on to remote servers hosting large language models, such as Qwen or DeepSeek. Pro maker 101 extended this firmware to also include expressive animations of a face on the OLED to give the chatbot more personality.

The circuit diagram and firmware are available on GitHub. To see the device being built step-by-step, you can check out the video below.