Project Status?

[thinkbig1979]

Hi all, just wondering what the status of the project is....not seeing much activity so curious whether there are plans to continue or perhaps stop development.

[nikito]

Another message was posted about this, but the dev maintaining the repo unexpectedly passed away, so don't foresee any future updates here.

[SimonB27P]

I'm keen to understand this. I am about to retire and one of the projects I was really looking forward to in my retirement was / is developing a voice controllable AI to help manage my home. I have been following Willow for a while and it was shocking and tragic to hear about Kristian. I am worried that all of his enthusiasm and hard work will go to waste.

However I see there are some updates in the Actions section of the project and I was wondering if other contributors are carrying on the good work. From what I could see Willow is the best solution out there if you want to have a proper sophisticated system that is better than, and much more secure than, the Googles and Alexas of this world, and with hardware you are prepared to have in your living room. It certainly was for me and I was all set to invest my time and money in the platform. Perhaps I still could right now but I am concerned whether ultimately Willow will or will not survive.

Does anyone have any insight?

[thiswillbeyourgithub]

Maybe this would be of interest to you: https://getleon.ai/

[SimonB27P]

Thanks for the quick response. Leon seems a long way from what Willow is. My main interest in Willow was in the hardware interface to the STT end. That is the problem I have with other solutions, either they are proprietary and not secure (Google / Alexa) or they are clunky and unreliable and/or the hardware is too hobbyist and it isn't anything you'd have in your living room or anything my wife would ever interact with. Or they don't seem to be addressing the hardware side, like Leon doesn't seem to be.

The project I envisaged for myself was getting a customised RAG'd local AI to do the thinking behind what needed to be done (for example sorting out the changes needed to heating profiles in different rooms when we have guests) but for the front-end interface I needed something relaible, accurate, wife-friendly and pretty much already there to deliver the text to the AI and provide TTS feedback / ask questions. Willow seemed to hit that spot.

I like the ESP32 Box3 idea, cheap, discreet and pretty (enough) and therefore readily installable around the house but I am struggling to find anything comparable to what Willow had done with it. Things like Rhasspy have most of the software but again are missing the hardware side. The closest I think I have found to Willow is the Home Assistant Voice PE but I don't use Home Assistant. I might yet have to use it as an intermediate step to do the STT and I understand you can play with your own LLM to get it to do what I want with it. Of course Willow integrated well with Home Assistant.

In a perfect world someone will pick up the baton and follow Kristian's fantastic work but I appreciate that's a big ask. If I had the skills it's be a lot of fun to do that but I am not even in the ballpark.

Thanks again

Best

Simon

[thiswillbeyourgithub]

Might also want to look at https://www.elatoai.com/ and seeedstudio (https://www.seeedstudio.com/)

[thiswillbeyourgithub]

Or really turning an old smartphone into a "home remote" that just loads the webpage to a uvicorn app is pretty doable 🤔

[tribbles3]

In a perfect world someone will pick up the baton and follow Kristian's fantastic work but I appreciate that's a big ask. If I had the skills it's be a lot of fun to do that but I am not even in the ballpark.

Thanks again

Best

Simon

You should look at the Discord channel as there appears to be someone that has taken over the project (stintel is his username).
https://discord.com/channels/1161666824178503720/1161666824774103042

[stintel]

Hi there, here's the announcement I made a few months ago on Discord:

Dear Willow community,

I am writing to share an update regarding the future of the Willow Ecosystem.

As most of you probably know already, we lost Kristian, the founder of Willow. I personally heard the news from the friend who introduced Kristian to me. I didn't know Kristian very long, and I didn't want to make an announcement about such a subject before knowing more. Recently I spoke to one of Kristian's close friends, who confirmed the news to me.

With that, I would like to officially announce, with great sadness, that Kristian Kielhofner, the founder of Willow, has passed away. He was an incredible person, and a great friend. He will be dearly missed.

Where does that leave Willow?

Working on Willow was an almost full-time, paid project for me. Around the time of the last Willow release (January 2024), I shifted focus to another project. Since then, I have not really worked on Willow anymore. I was still using Willow on a daily basis, and in my apartment, it worked really well. Later that year I moved to a house, and found that Willow was almost unusable there. As there was plenty of work to be done in the house, figuring out why, and trying to fix it, was not a priority, and I basically stopped using Willow.

In January 2025, I found some time to look into why Willow wasn't really usable in my house. I also did a poll (⁠general⁠) to find out if Willow still had active users, as it seemed many people had moved on to alternatives. Out of the 14 people who responded, 7 people confirmed they were still using it. Not a high number, but as I was starting to use Willow again myself, I decided I wanted to try keep the Willow project alive. As this is no longer a paid project, I won't be able to spend as much time on it as I did until January 2024, so development will be slower paced. I will do a few more announcements with more details soon.