I got some Atom Echos, configured them, and they work! I even customized my own wakeword and it worked on the first try. Thanks, Home Assistant team, for such an awesome product as Home Assistant and for fantastic documentation.

Though the Echos and voice recognition works, I’m waiting about 28 seconds between speaking and having Home Assistant respond. “OK Nabu, do the thing”…then I wait ~28 seconds and then at the same time I hear the Echo say “Done” and Home Assistant responds.

Is the delay due to the Echos being small/cheap/slow processors? They react instantly to the wakeword, but perhaps that requires less processing power because it’s trained. Is the delay due to forwarding the audio content of my spoken word over the network to Home Assistant so Whisper can process it? I’m able to transfer other content over my network very quickly, and I doubt the data size of a few spoken words is very large. Is the delay in Whisper processing my spoken command?

What has your experience been with the Echos and openwakeword?

  • daftwerder@lemm.eeEnglish
    5·
    11 months ago

    I had some similar issues with all of my voice recognition / responses being very slow… I am running on home assistant supervised on top of Proxmox. What solved the issue for me was changing the CPU type to ‘host’ in Proxmox. I guess the recognition may rely on some CPU extensions being available.

  • Mike Wooskey@lemmy.d.thewooskeys.comOPEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    I changed the VM’s CPU type in Proxmox and gave the VM more resources (most of the hosts’s RAM and CPU cores) and the delays cut in half to around 16 seconds. So I know what’s causing my delay (or probably most of it). I guess I need a beefier box.

  • Billygoat@catata.fishEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Just bought an Atom Echo. Can’t wait for it to arrive so that I can give Janet commands.

  • fixmycode@feddit.clEnglish
    0·
    11 months ago

    wondering if all this investment they’re doing on voice is going to have diminishing returns, like, the whole pitch for HA cloud integration is that you could see and use your HA devices with your cloud enabled voice assistant services, right? Nabu Casa makes money for the HA project. is getting rid of the middle man worth it? I needed some first hand experience to convince myself about getting into it or just simply keep paying for NC

    • paf@jlai.luEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      (not first hand experience but) Nabu casa is a way to support HA development, having cloud assistant is just a bonus, you also get easy external access and another bonus is that you don’t need to setup the different addons to be able to use assist, while it is doable on something like raspberry 4, problem will be latency compare to nabu casa or you will need a more powerful device to be able to run them smooth. If you didn’t bother to setup cloud assistant by yourself to avoid fees, chances are you will stick to nabu casa and it is a good thing as you are supporting home assistant development.

  • plasticcheese@lemmy.oneEnglish
    0·
    11 months ago

    I bought a couple of Echo’s and they are excellent little devices. However, I’m not seeing any delay at all. Probably half a second or less before I get a response. I do find that if its a command I haven’t used before, it can take a few secs, but after that its basically instant. I suspect it is all hardware based as the HA VM is running on some beefy hardware.

    An issue I have a lot is the voice breaking up as it talks back to you. Sounds like someone with bad mobile reception. It happens maybe 50% of the time. I figured things would get better as the system gets developed further.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
      11·
      11 months ago

      Echo’s

      So Echoes ? I think it’s totally okay to just pluralize words like, well, words.