Local voice control for Home Assistant gets another fully open option this week as Pine64 ships the PineVoice, a smart speaker that runs entirely on a RISC-V microcontroller and keeps wake-word listening on-device. Renamed from the earlier PineVox and more than two years in development, it leans on the Bouffalo Lab BL606P SoC, pairing a 64-bit T-Head C906 core (RV64IMAFCV) at 480 MHz with a 32-bit E907 core at 320 MHz. That puts an open instruction set at the center of a voice satellite, a niche otherwise dominated by ESP32 hardware.
The BL606P brings WiFi 4, dual-mode Bluetooth 5.x, and an 802.15.4 (Zigbee) radio onboard, alongside 16MB of embedded PSRAM and a separate 16MB SPI NOR flash. The enclosure adds two digital microphones, a speaker, four RGB LEDs, a USB 2.0 OTG port, and physical volume, start/stop, and mute buttons, the last with its own LED. Power is 5V/2A over USB-C, and the cube measures 6.5 x 6.5 x 6.6 cm (2.6 x 2.6 x 2.6 inches). Pine64 publishes full documentation including PDF schematics for both boards plus links to the SDK and firmware repositories. The underlying development toolkit is Bouffalo Lab's bouffalo_sdk, which explicitly lists the BL606P as a supported target alongside the rest of their chip lineup and is published under the Apache 2.0 license, giving developers an open foundation for custom firmware work even before Pine64's shipping firmware source is posted.
The software side is where the device shows its early-stage nature. The default firmware speaks the Wyoming satellite protocol, which the project itself now lists as deprecated. The Home Assistant ecosystem has shifted toward the ESPHome voice assistant protocol, which carries the newer features like media playback, timers, and on-device wake-word stop, so PineVoice firmware will need to follow if it wants parity with current satellites. Pine64 also notes that the source for the shipping firmware isn't yet posted, and warns that wake-word detection and general performance may be rough.
Given those caveats, Pine64 frames the PineVoice less as a finished appliance and more as a smart-speaker development kit, with consumer-grade behavior dependent on firmware maturing over time. The mic mute is a hardware kill switch rather than a software toggle, which fits a setup where speech-to-text, wake-word detection, and text-to-speech all run locally through Home Assistant Assist.
The PineVoice sells for $50 (46 euros), shipping with a USB-A to USB-C cable and a quick start guide, and carries a 30-day warranty.
