Recommended hardware for using HA with Voice | Home Assistant | Page 1

valid ermine May 30, 2025, 3:51 PM

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Hey all I've recently decided to destroy my sanity and try to transition to voice in home assistant. I purchased the Voice PE and got it connected.

1st question I have is should I connect it to ESPHome? I know it stops automatic updates which is a nice feature and wondering is it worth it to have ESPHome take it over. Gives you that nice warning about you have to do it.

2nd question would be best setup for running Home Assistant. Currently I am running Home Assistant in a VM that has 6 cores and 8GBs of memory to it on proxmox. I have a zigbee usb stick on it. Works well and currently connected with Google so I can use google to control the home. Now I'm looking to move to local voice. Is my base configuration good? Should I upgrade the VM at all? What can be done to maybe speed up the process.

Any good videos around the topic you guys find useful on the topic? Appreciate all the input!

random valley May 30, 2025, 4:14 PM

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valid ermine Hey all I've recently decided to destroy my sanity and try to transition to voic...

dont adopt it into ESPHome builder tool unless you intend to make custom firmware changes. there is no reason to do it otherwise.

I run my HA on a mini PC but i offload my whisper to another system which has a GPU and uses gpu acceleration to speed up the STT and allows me to run a larger whisper model (and local llm)

your current VM sounds fine for running the HA server but to run fully local voice quicker and more accuratly you may need to make changes. but it really depends on what your goal is, what you currently have available etc...

valid ermine May 30, 2025, 4:26 PM

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random valley dont adopt it into ESPHome builder tool unless you intend to make custom firmwar...

That was the route I was thinking needed to happen was a separate setup. Right now I have a 2019 MB Pro with i9 but only a Radeon Pro 5300M 4GB. I have a 580 in the proxmox as well thats not tied to anything anymore and my desktop is running a 6700XT I believe it is. I can move some things around or if I need to get something more I can go looking.

random valley May 30, 2025, 4:33 PM

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i have a 5060ti (16gb) on one of my proxmox servers which is used for gpu acceleration but that is more extreme tthan is needed for basic stuff as i also run LLM on it. if you just want basic voice then a lower end card is fine. before that upgrade i ran a 1650 super(4gb) which ran whisper perfectly fine.

if you only want more basic commands you can also look at using "speech to phrase" which is more limited in commands as it cant account for variables but it runs fast without acceleration if you only want to use "fixed commands"

valid ermine May 30, 2025, 4:38 PM

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wonder how well it would work on this macbook pro. Its my old work laptop and I just watch videos on it during work at the new job occasionally lol. That or curious to try setting up a VM and pass the radeon through to it, that has 8GB. You use an LXC container to run the whisper or another VM? IEventually I'd like to do an AI machine and thinking to see how these new intel cards look when they come out.

random valley May 30, 2025, 4:41 PM

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whisper is runnong on docker in an ubuntu virtual machine on proxmox. the GPU is attached directly to the VM by PCIE passthrough. I dont know anything about gpu acceleration of whisper with a radeon card. i am sure there are probably options but its not something i have looked into as i tend to keep with nvidia cards.

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this project maybe might help - https://github.com/fyhertz/rocm-wyoming-whisper

valid ermine May 30, 2025, 7:53 PM

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Thanks for the input. I also have the 580 passed through to my docker vm. I did the same, proxmox with a ubuntu vm running docker. I'll have to give this a try

valid ermine May 31, 2025, 3:27 PM

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cant seem to get this thing to even start lol

random valley May 31, 2025, 3:35 PM

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valid ermine cant seem to get this thing to even start lol

does it tell you why its failing?

valid ermine May 31, 2025, 3:49 PM

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no i just get a restarting 132 on the docker

dusky pivot May 31, 2025, 4:46 PM

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Please share exactly what you see.

valid ermine Jun 1, 2025, 4:08 AM

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Hey impact sorry for delay. Not really anything to show. Docker logs don't have anything because it's not starting. I can share the dockerfile I ran from that repo where I ran the base docker file and nothing, I tried also some environment variables based on an open issue another person mentioned but still nothing. When it starts and you do a docker ps and you look at the status it just says restarting 132

random valley Jun 1, 2025, 4:23 PM

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valid ermine Hey impact sorry for delay. Not really anything to show. Docker logs don't have ...

132 is to do with cpu instruction set usually i think. some kind of incompatibility. is stuff diabled in your bios maybe?

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or maybe a kernel module is missing. i don't know enough about the specific pieces of this puzzle

valid ermine Jun 1, 2025, 5:16 PM

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So it is a proxmox vm and I've passed thru the GPU. I don't know if I need to install anything specifically for it and I can't find anything stating something needs installed or setup before running the docker.

valid ermine Jun 1, 2025, 5:42 PM

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I don't think I've left anything disabled in the bios. It's an older supermicro board with only pcie 2 from looking at it. Pretty sure at this point this box might not be worth trynna do anything more.

random valley Jun 1, 2025, 6:13 PM

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valid ermine So it is a proxmox vm and I've passed thru the GPU. I don't know if I need to in...

check the vm and ensure its cpu type is set to "Host"

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valid ermine Jun 1, 2025, 6:21 PM

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oooo its not set to host

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KVM64

random valley Jun 1, 2025, 6:25 PM

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yup, that will have been slowing things down a bit too.
so after switching it will be zoom zoom time 🙂 and all the cpu instructions should be available to the vm

valid ermine Jun 1, 2025, 6:26 PM

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Ahhhhh

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ok let me give this a shot

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i cant change type can I?

dusky pivot Jun 1, 2025, 6:36 PM

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Of course.

valid ermine Jun 1, 2025, 6:37 PM

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I must be missing something because its graeyed out.

dusky pivot Jun 1, 2025, 6:37 PM

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Can you share what you see?

valid ermine Jun 1, 2025, 6:38 PM

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nm got it, let me change it now. Alright lets see

valid ermine Jun 1, 2025, 8:24 PM

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alright so its on host, built it all over again and yea it just sits and does this ```CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
196af6630d55 whisper-rocm-whisper "/src/run.sh --downl…" 30 seconds ago Restarting (132) 1 second ago whisper

dusky pivot Jun 1, 2025, 8:51 PM

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What does docker logs -tf name/id say? Can you also share your compose file? Is amdgpu-dkms installed? Does lscpu show the right CPU now?

valid ermine Jun 2, 2025, 3:23 AM

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Alright running the lscpu does return me the intel cpu thats in here. The compose file is the one found here https://github.com/fyhertz/rocm-wyoming-whisper/blob/main/docker-compose.yml and amdgpu-dkms I did not install that. My understanding was the kernel has all the drivers so I'll give that an install.

GitHub

rocm-wyoming-whisper/docker-compose.yml at main · fyhertz/rocm-wyo...

Wyoming protocol server for whisper speech to text system on AMD GPUs - fyhertz/rocm-wyoming-whisper

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Maybe you have some insight on this. When I run amdgpu_top it tells me my graphics card is a 480 and I know for a fact its a 580 lol.

dusky pivot Jun 2, 2025, 3:31 AM

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Hmm. What does lspci and nvtop say? Does docker compose up log anything?

valid ermine Jun 2, 2025, 3:33 AM

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00:10.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Ellesmere [Radeon RX 470/480/570/570X/580/580X/590] (rev c7) 00:10.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Ellesmere HDMI Audio [Radeon RX 470/480 / 570/580/590]

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installing nvtop now

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dusky pivot Jun 2, 2025, 3:38 AM

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Without -d so it starts in the foreground. About the model I'm not sure. Might be normal considering lspci shows it like that.

valid ermine Jun 2, 2025, 3:40 AM

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valid ermine Jun 2, 2025, 4:37 AM

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ok amdgpu-dkms I'm having trouble getting installed, I got amdgpu-install to run but yea I still can't get the container to load.

dusky pivot Jun 2, 2025, 11:27 AM

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That part is from here: https://rocm.docs.amd.com/projects/install-on-linux/en/latest/how-to/docker.html
I only have a AMD iGPU. Maybe I can try it with that later.

valid ermine Jun 2, 2025, 2:17 PM

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Thank you, let me try doing this rocm install part, I didn't do this. I was looking around my stack of hardware to see what I have that make life easy.

dusky pivot Jun 2, 2025, 2:42 PM

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Damn this docker image is enormous. Try to run it like this

docker run --entrypoint '' -v $(pwd)/data:/data -v $(pwd)/src:/src -it --device=/dev/kfd --device=/dev/dri --security-opt seccomp=unconfined --group-add video -p 10300:10300 rocm-wyoming-whisper bash

This gives you a CLI into the container. You can then run it like this which might give more information

python -m wyoming_whisper --download-dir /data --model medium --debug

Also try

apt install strace
strace python -m wyoming_whisper --download-dir /data --model medium --debug

valid ermine Jun 2, 2025, 2:56 PM

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Will give that a try. I think I have other issues with recently rebooting my docker VM docker just stops and never starts.I can uninstall and reinstall it and it works again. Which points me to moving to a different server but I dont think the new cisco server I'm thinking of migrating to has space for the card lol.

valid ermine Jun 2, 2025, 3:16 PM

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root@83e1d4b7dc7f:/src# python -m wyoming_whisper --download-dir /data --model medium --debug
Illegal instruction (core dumped)```

#Recommended hardware for using HA with Voice