An MCP-based Chatbot
(English | 中文 | 日本語)
Introduction
👉 Human: Give AI a camera vs AI: Instantly finds out the owner hasn't washed hair for three days【bilibili】
👉 Handcraft your AI girlfriend, beginner's guide【bilibili】
As a voice interaction entry, the XiaoZhi AI chatbot leverages the AI capabilities of large models like Qwen / DeepSeek, and achieves multi-terminal control via the MCP protocol.
Recent Updates
- The project now requires ESP-IDF v6.0.1 or later. ESP-IDF
release/v6.1 is the recommended SDK branch. ESP-IDF 5.x is no longer supported. The current matrix contains 171 variants; ESP32-S31 builds require IDF 6.1 or later.
- MQTT and BluFi cryptographic code has migrated to PSA Crypto. IDF 6 component splits and third-party dependency compatibility have also been addressed.
- Audio pipeline concurrency, MQTT/UDP packet validation, and release-matrix selection have been hardened.
- ESP32-P4 Rev1 and Rev3 are both supported on IDF 6 with ESP-SR 2.4.7.
Features Implemented
- Wi-Fi, wired Ethernet, USB RNDIS, and ML307/EC801E or NT26 Cat.1 4G networking; supported boards can switch between Wi-Fi and 4G
- Offline voice wake-up with ESP-SR, including customizable wake words
- Two communication transports: WebSocket and MQTT + UDP
- Opus audio streaming with conventional streaming ASR + LLM + TTS pipelines and Realtime end-to-end voice models; AEC-capable hardware supports realtime full-duplex interaction
- Speaker recognition, identifies the current speaker 3D Speaker
- OLED / LCD displays with emoji and rich expression support, plus camera vision input on supported boards
- Battery display and power management
- 39 interface languages, with localized voice prompts where available and English fallback
- ESP32, ESP32-C3, ESP32-C5, ESP32-C6, ESP32-S3, and ESP32-P4 chip platforms
- Wi-Fi provisioning through hotspot or BluFi
- Device-side MCP for device control (Speaker, LED, Servo, GPIO, etc.)
- Cloud-side MCP to extend large model capabilities (smart home control, PC desktop operation, knowledge search, email, etc.)
- Customizable wake words, fonts, emojis, and chat backgrounds with online web-based editing (Custom Assets Generator)
Hardware
Breadboard DIY Practice
See the Feishu document tutorial:
👉 "XiaoZhi AI Chatbot Encyclopedia"
Breadboard demo:
Supports 138 Board Directories and 171 Release Variants (Partial List)
- LiChuang ESP32-S3 Development Board
- Espressif ESP32-S3-BOX-3
- M5Stack CoreS3
- M5Stack AtomS3R + Echo Base
- Magic Button 2.4
- Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-1.8
- LILYGO T-Circle-S3
- XiaGe Mini C3
- CuiCan AI Pendant
- WMnologo-Xingzhi-1.54TFT
- SenseCAP Watcher
- ESP-HI Low Cost Robot Dog
Software
Firmware Flashing
For beginners, it is recommended to use the firmware that can be flashed without setting up a development environment.
The firmware connects to the official xiaozhi.me server by default. Personal users can register an account to use the Qwen real-time model for free.
👉 Beginner's Firmware Flashing Guide
Development Environment
- Cursor or VSCode
- Install the ESP-IDF plugin. The minimum SDK is ESP-IDF v6.0.1; ESP-IDF
release/v6.1 is recommended. ESP-IDF 5.x is not supported.
- Linux is better than Windows for faster compilation and fewer driver issues
- This project uses Google C++ code style, please ensure compliance when submitting code
Use the release/v6.1 branch rather than the v6.1 release tag: an ESP32-C3 Wi-Fi initialization failure with that tag is reported in #2344. After switching SDK revisions, run git submodule update --init --recursive in the ESP-IDF directory, source its export.sh, and run idf.py fullclean in this project before rebuilding.
Developer Documentation
Large Model Configuration
If you already have a XiaoZhi AI chatbot device and have connected to the official server, you can log in to the xiaozhi.me console for configuration.
👉 Backend Operation Video Tutorial (Old Interface)
Related Open Source Projects
For server deployment on personal computers, refer to the following open-source projects:
Other client projects using the XiaoZhi communication protocol:
Custom Assets Tools:
About the Project
This is an open-source ESP32 project, released under the MIT license, allowing anyone to use it for free, including for commercial purposes.
We hope this project helps everyone understand AI hardware development and apply rapidly evolving large language models to real hardware devices.
If you have any ideas or suggestions, please feel free to raise Issues or join our Discord or QQ group: 1095994019
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