#Voice PE - Voice responses stutter

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

misty lantern
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I’ve just set up my new Voice Assistant PE device. All seems to work okay, except that most voice responses are broken up, as in:
“Sorry, I”…“couldn’t under”…“stand that.” or “Turned on the s”…“switch”.
The responses seem parsed in segments of three or four syllables, with each pause between segments a half second or more in duration.

Some voice responses get truncated, for example: “Sorry, I”…“couldn’t” - and then nothing more.

This is my second Assist speaker. For the past year I’ve been running an RPi 4B-based Wyoming Voice satellite, it does not suffer from this. For both devices, Piper and Faster Whisper both execute on the Home Assistant host.

What might this indicate? Any suggestions towards resolving it?
Thanks.

haughty fern
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Bad wifi signal perhaps? Try moving the VPE closer to your access point and see if it still reproduces

misty lantern
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I had wondered that. Where I'm testing it is further from the AP than the RPi unit.
So I again tried it closer - less than 2m from the AP. There's maybe a slight improvement, but it still stutters. Whereas across the house the RPi unit is rock solid.
Thanks.

haughty fern
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Different antennas and wifi hardware, though. Is the RPi also on 2.4GHz? Try changing the wifi channel to something less crowded, see if that helps. The improvement you mentioned suggests a different channel might help

misty lantern
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All our smart (IoT) devices are on their own dedicated wifi network, on which 5GHz is turned off, it only offers 2.4GHz. There are about 50 wifi devices, but the AP is supposedly able to support up to 99.
The internal wifi on the RPi Assist speaker died soon after we got it, and in it's place I'm using a cheap USB thumbnail wifi adapter. And it still works fine.
The IoT AP operates on channel 01, while our "for people" AP was at channel 04. I've now bumped the people AP to 06. As expected, it made no difference for the VPE.
Thanks.

misty lantern
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In this image taken from our IoT AP, "home-assistant-voice" is the VPE, while "kbw75" is the Raspberry Pi Wyoming Voice satellite. Am I reading this correctly, that the VPE has significantly better wifi throughput than the Pi? Or is signal strength measured with a different metric?

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autumn bronze
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i have had this happen to me randomly too. comes and goes. there was one time it was doing it continually for a while, i unplugged/replugged it and it was fine after a restart.
Its not common enough that i have dedicated any time to investigating it further though

misty rune
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@misty lantern did you submit an email for this?

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I may have just responded if so.

misty lantern
misty rune
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@echo gull have you ever had stuttering issues as described here from VPE or another device?

echo gull
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@final cradle does that ring a bell to you?

final cradle
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The stuttering that I've seen from people with Voice PEs seems different...

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It possible a poor wifi connection could explain it, but it still seemds odd

misty lantern
misty rune
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What are your pipeline settings?

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So I can try the same

misty lantern
misty rune
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I can try setting up the same stt/tts and see how it goes

misty lantern
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If you're willing, that could be revealing. But I would have thought my implementation is pretty vanilla...unless maybe most users tend to eschew local for either Home Assistant Cloud or some shiny AI provider?

rustic comet
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I'm running whisper and piper with cuda acceleration locally and also have two Voice PE, niether have this slowdown 🙂

misty lantern
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Update: I've sent the unit back to the vendor, hopeful for a no-cost exchange.

raw crown
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Just received my PE guys. Can't wait to get my hands on it. 😅

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