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XiaoZhi AI

Open-source ESP32 voice chatbot with wake word, Opus streaming and a display

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What XiaoZhi AI does

  • Open-source ESP32 voice chatbot with wake word, Opus streaming and a display
  • Free official server lets personal users try a Qwen real-time model after registering
  • Device-side and cloud MCP for controlling IoT gadgets
  • MIT licensed firmware supporting many ESP32 chips

XiaoZhi AI — straight answers

What is XiaoZhi AI?

XiaoZhi AI is listed under Real-Time Voice Agents, in the AI Agents & Automation category on Flocci AI Tools. Open-source ESP32 voice chatbot with wake word, Opus streaming and a display. It is free, with no paid plan attached, and it lives at xiaozhi.me.

Is XiaoZhi AI free?

Yes, it's free to use, but sign-up needs phone-number verification. If you need it free right now, Kyutai Unmute does the same job for free.

Can I use XiaoZhi AI in a browser, or is there an app?

XiaoZhi AI needs to be installed or self-hosted — it doesn't run in a browser tab. It is available on the web and self-hosting.

What can XiaoZhi AI do?

XiaoZhi AI does 4 things the catalog singles out: Open-source esp32 voice chatbot with wake word, opus streaming and a display; free official server lets personal users try a qwen real-time model after registering; device-side and cloud mcp for controlling iot gadgets; mit licensed firmware supporting many esp32 chips.

What is the best free alternative to XiaoZhi AI?

Kyutai Unmute is the best free alternative: it does the same job and you can start without paying. Bolna, LiveKit Agents and Pipecat also start free. The full list is on the alternatives page.

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XiaoZhi AI alternatives

Compare all alternatives →

Vapi

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  • Orchestrates STT/LLM/TTS providers of choice into one low-latency voice-agent pipeline
  • Usage-based per-minute pricing with free trial minutes included
  • SOC 2/HIPAA/PCI compliance add-ons for regulated call-center deployments
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Retell AI

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  • Free starting credit with no contract required
  • Supports swapping GPT, Claude or Gemini as the reasoning layer per agent
  • Batch calling campaigns plus live AI-to-human call transfer built in
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Bland AI

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  • All-in-one per-minute pricing bundles LLM+STT+TTS with no separate token pass-through charges
  • Free start with call credits plus an inbound number included
  • Tiered platform fees (Build/Scale) unlock lower per-minute rates for high volume
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LiveKit Agents

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  • Apache-2.0 open-source framework, fully self-hostable on your own servers
  • Native WebRTC client support across web/mobile/telephony out of the box
  • Native Model Context Protocol (MCP) support for tool-using voice agents
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Pipecat

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  • BSD-2-Clause open-source Python framework for real-time voice/multimodal agents
  • Supports distributed multi-agent systems with handoffs over a shared bus
  • Maintained by Daily with an active plugin ecosystem for STT/LLM/TTS providers
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Ultravox

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  • Speech-native processing skips the STT-to-text bottleneck, preserving tone/cadence/pitch
  • Free tier: 5¢/min including TTS for up to 5 concurrent calls
  • Open-weight models (fixie-ai) published on Hugging Face for research use
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Head-to-head comparisons

XiaoZhi AI vs VapiXiaoZhi AI vs Retell AIXiaoZhi AI vs Bland AIXiaoZhi AI vs LiveKit AgentsXiaoZhi AI vs PipecatXiaoZhi AI vs Ultravox