Espressif – The ideal starting point for IoT with the ESP32-S3-BOX

Espressif’s ESP32-S3 (here our Post about the S3) has started its series production and we would like to show the capabilities of the powerful core inside the SoC with the ESP32-S3-BOX. We already introduced the S3-BOX in one of our news (LINK) once and now we would like to go a bit deeper on its IoT features and Espressif’s simplified version – the ESP32-S3-BOX-Lite.

The ESP32-S3-BOX is Espressif’s AI voice-development kit, which provides a platform for developing the control of smart devices with offline and online voice assistants. The ESP32-S3-BOX is ideal for developing not only smart speakers, but also IoT devices that achieve human-computer voice interaction directly. To this end, ESP32-S3-BOX integrates a touch screen controller, various sensors, an infrared controller and a smart gateway.

What’s inside the Box?

Aside from the powerful ESP32-S3 the BOX is also equipped with a variety of peripherals, such as a 2.4-inch display with a QVGA resolution (320×240), a capacitive touch screen, a dual microphone, a speaker, and two Pmod™-compatible headers which allow for the extensibility of the hardware.

It runs Espressif’s own audio front-end (AFE) algorithm, as well as ESP-Skainet (Espressif’s offline voice-assistant SDK), and the Alexa-for-IoT SDK, thus providing users with excellent offline and online voice functions.

It is worth mentioning that the latest version of ESP-Skainet (Espressif’s offline voice-assistant SDK) supports two new functions which can materialize a more efficient interactive experience tailored to users’ needs:

• Support for waking up the device at any time while it is speaking or playing music.
• Support for talking to the device continuously once it is woken up.

In addition, ESP-Skainet reduces the rate of false wake-ups and improves the device’s speech-recognition performance while ensuring an excellent wake-up rate.

The differences between the S3-BOX and the S3-BOX-Lite

In order to meet the different functional and cost requirements of each area, Espressif also has launched the ESP32-S3-BOX-Lite, a simplified version of Espressif’s AI voice-development kit. It has similar offline and online voice functions to ESP32-S3-BOX but without its capacitive touch panel and mute buttons. However, ESP32-S3-BOX-Lite has three additional function buttons which can be customized by users.

The table below shows a comparison between ESP32-S3-BOX and ESP32-S3-BOX-Lite:

Depending on your application’s needs the choice from the BOX versions is the ideal start for an AI enabled IoT application with the ESP32-S3 using Espressif’s great software environment.

Don’t hesitate to contact us on further information for both BOX types or if you only need the ESP32-S3 in either its SoC or module form!