In building robotic systems that interact with people through speech, many robotics engineers are obliged to treat artificial speech recognition and synthesis as a black-box problem best left to speech engineers to solve. Yet speech engineers today typically do not have access to the kinds of expensive robots needed for this development. Progress on the human-robot speech interface thus suffers from something of a diffusion of responsibility. In an attempt to remedy the situation, we have developed a low-cost interactive embodied speech device. The device is constructed from off-the-shelf components and from 3D-printed and laser-cut parts. We make the files for the 3D and laser-cut parts freely available for download. In addition to offering basic assembled devices and kits for self-assembly, we provide an assembly guide and a shopping list of components a user will need in order to build, maintain, and customize their own device. We supply a basic software framework (in both Matlab and in C/C++), and template code for a ROS node for interfacing with the device. The idea is to establish a standard and accessible hardware platform with an open-source foundation for the sharing of ideas and research.