The Whisper round-trip is the interesting part, not the case. An ESP32 that holds an OpenAI key is a WAN-talking guest. I would keep it off the LAN-admin plane — own VLAN, no path to Proxmox or UniFi — same as any other gadget that phones home. Local dictation (open-whisper on a LAN-only box) is the version I would actually leave powered on.
The Whisper round-trip is the interesting part, not the case. An ESP32 that holds an OpenAI key is a WAN-talking guest. I would keep it off the LAN-admin plane — own VLAN, no path to Proxmox or UniFi — same as any other gadget that phones home. Local dictation (open-whisper on a LAN-only box) is the version I would actually leave powered on.