This $30 Project Puts Cloud AI Right on Your Wrist

One of the biggest selling points of an AI voice assistant is its ability to enhance our productivity. By being able to simply ask questions whenever the need arises, we can find answers without breaking our concentration or interrupting our normal workflow. Unfortunately, most AI assistants fall short of this ideal. Smart speakers only work if the user is within range, and browser-based tools have a similar issue. Smartphones may seem like a good solution, but unlocking the device and launching an app creates too much friction.

Redditor Tsixom has come up with a way to have an AI assistant that’s always ready to listen. It is built into a wristwatch so that it’s always available. And since it’s a dedicated device, there is no lock screen, and no app to launch. You just tap a button and ask your question.

No custom hardware is involved, making it super simple to reproduce this project. The watch is a Waveshare ESP32-S3 2.06-inch AMOLED Touch Watch Development Board. It’s equipped with an ESP32-S3 microcontroller with a 32-bit LX7 dual-core processor with 8MB of PSRAM and 32MB of flash memory. The touchscreen display has a 410×502 pixel resolution, and the watch has everything else a voice assistant needs, including the microphone and speaker. The watch sells for about $30.

You will need a Wi-Fi connection available for the watch to work, however. The ESP32-S3 may be powerful as far as microcontrollers are concerned, but it can’t run a language model locally. Instead, the device captures the user’s voice locally, then sends it to cloud-based APIs. The audio is first transcribed to text, then sent to a language model for processing. At present, the text-based response is returned to the watch and displayed on the screen, but in the future, Tsixom plans to use text-to-speech software so responses can be played through the speaker.

The full source code has been made available on GitHub for anyone who would like to wear an AI assistant on their wrist.