I'm seeing some sources that say it's not possible to use a custom openWakeWord wake word with the VPE. Why is that? I went through the process of training a custom wake word using the instructions in the HA docs and the Colab script, added the .tflite file to Home Assistant via Samba, and selected my new wake word in the HA voice assistant settings page under "Streaming wake word engine", but the device settings for the VPE only have the built-in microWakeWord options, and it still only reacts to "Okay Nabu". Is this a limitation of the hardware? Something that will come eventually? Or is there some way to do it that I'm missing?
#Custom wake word with VPE?
obsidian stump
tropic herald
The software implementation of the VPE is built using microwakeword and ignores any other wakeword config in the HA pipeline. If you want to use your custom wakeword you will have to adopt the VPE in esphome and modify it to use openwakeword.
The esphome firmware for the VPE is here: https://github.com/esphome/home-assistant-voice-pe
obsidian stump
The software implementation of the VPE is built using microwakeword and ignores ...
Would that be a very involved process in terms of rewriting the firmware code? Or closer to the scale of just changing a few config variables?
tropic herald
Should be somewhat straightforward but not just a simple change in config. You'd need to remove the microwakeword component and reconfigure the voice assistant component to use the HA pipeline wakeword. Then some tinkering with the LED ring animations maybe.
You should be able to re-use the on_wake_word_detected listener from microwakeword and use it in the voice assistant component.
Maybe some tinkering with the microphone settings as mww uses a different microphone than the voice assistant component.
obsidian stump
Should be somewhat straightforward but not just a simple change in config. You'd...
Interesting - a little outside my comfort zone, but I'll take a look. Can you point me towards any resources that might be helpful? And is there a reason the VPE is set up in this way, i.e. are there any downsides to switching to the other wake word system? Have you heard anything about whether there are plans for the VPE to support custom wake words out of the box in the future? Thanks.
pastel tusk
I imagine it's a user experience thing. The custom wake word stuff uses artificially generated samples, and requires a lot of tinkering and tweaking to get it somewhat usable without tons of false accepts or false rejects. Also mww runs on device, so it doesn't constantly have to talk back to the ha server eating up network resources for every satellite, whereas openwakeword requires each device to talk to it constantly.