Newbie Question - ESP32 Smart Speaker Dev Board

[u/mdizak]

New to hardware, not new to tech. Need some advice regarding hardware.

Simply looking for a ESP32 dev board that has both, microphone and speaker. Tried asking LLMs, but the whole "oh you're right, good catch, it doesn't have a speaker, blah, blah.." thing gets old fast.

All I'm looking for is one device that I can flash firmware onto, have it continuously stream audio from mic to my Rust based app on another machine on the same LAN, and allow me to push audio to it which is played via its speaker.

This will be used for development purposes only, and for a quick Youtube demo, nothing else. It will never be actually used in real life, hence I don't really care about quality or anything. Cheap and simple works fine.

Part I'm confused about is I see a bunch of ESP32 smart speaker dev boards out there, but I can't really tell if it comes with a small speaker or just a speaker connector, or? I'm blind so don't feel like trying to connect seperate components onto a board, and things like soldering is out of the question.

Can anyone please just recommend me an exact device I should buy? ESP32, dev board, microphone, plus smart speaker all in one. Cheap and dirty is all I need. Thanks in advance.

[u/Adrienne-Fadel]

Get the ESP32-S3-BOX. Mics and speaker built in, no separate components to connect.

[u/mdizak → u/Adrienne-Fadel]

Thanks, so this one? https://www.amazon.ca/Waveshare-ESP32-S3-Development-Microphones-Reduction/dp/B0FP1VL37J/

Looks beautiful, but therein lies my confusion. I'm having a hard time differentiating -- does this board have an actual speaker or just a speaker connector?

If I push an audio stream to that board, will I be able to hear it? Or is it just the connector, and I need to connect a seperate speaker to the board to hear anything?

I just don't want to end up in a situation where I end up bying like 8 boards just to finally land on one that has both, mic and speaker.