Hardware verification for the proposed solution has been completed. The ESP32-based hardware used for verification has been validated. This verification board can record audio upon button press and stop recording upon release. The recorded data is then sent to a TCP server.

This verification board can now serve as a basic trigger-based voice assistant, although it is still far from our ultimate goal. Attached are photos of the verified hardware solution. The open-source link for the entire project design will be updated shortly, including hardware design, preliminary verification code, and a simple test server code (which merely packages the received audio data into a WAV file).