Voice assistant satellite hardware recommendation

[torpid ether]

I have been super happy with my assist pipeline running on an esphome device. I really want something louder though. Any specific recommendations for a device I can link my assist pipeline to, ideally with local wake word, with louder speakers that could also play music and a better microphone?

Also would be fine with something with audio IO so I could plug in my own speakers and microphone

Any ideas? Thanks.

[whole cliff]

a Voice-PE is a great device that works out the box. its speaker is fairly loud but its only really good for voice stuff realistically its no good for music. however it has a 3.5mm jack for speaker output which solves that issue. THIS is a setup I have with it.

or if you want more custom build you could look at something like the "ReSpeaker Lite" as a base to build on.

[torpid ether]

Thank you

I’ll have to check that out. If I could just get a better microphone too now too 🙂

[whole cliff]

the microphone array on the voice-pe is pretty good and the xmos chip cleans the audio up too. is it the best microphone ever? no... but for general use in a house i have had no problems with it

[torpid ether]

How does it compare to a Google home mini?

Maybe that’s the one I should try

I tried an esp s3 box3

Microphone on that one was pretty disappointing

[torpid ether]

ReSpeaker XMOS XVF3800 with XIAO ESP32S3 – AI-powered 4-Mic Array for Clear Voice Even in Noise
SKU 114993700
https://www.seeedstudio.com/ReSpeaker-XVF3800-4-Mic-Array-With-XIAO-ESP32S3-p-6489.html

on your advice on respeaker, maybe I will give this a shot

Seems very similar to my dev box, but with a better mic and 3.5mm for speaker

[whole cliff]

the microphone setup on the VPE is many times better than the S3-BOX-3. its a better array and also has the XMOS chip to handle audio cleaning/normalisation

[torpid ether]

Thanks, I will go with that or some repeater

Respeaker

We are used to shouting at Google from a room away, lol

But their voice assistants are their last device in our home and it would be nice to replace them

[whole cliff]

gotcha

I hope it works out, whichever way you go 🙂

[calm violet]

This one is still in dev for HA.

[torpid ether]

Because there is not an esp config for it?

[calm violet]

Grab Respeaker Lite with S3. Check the repo https://github.com/formatBCE/Respeaker-Lite-ESPHome-integration

[calm violet]

Yes. It's in the works, but slowly

[torpid ether]

How does the mic compare with other options?

I like that is it cheaper, lol

[calm violet]

Comparable to Voice PE.
The disadvantage is that you will need to buy speaker too, solder everything together and print the enclosure

All instructions are there.

[calm violet]

The chip XU-316 is the same on PE, Respeaker Lite and FPH Satellite1

[torpid ether]

Thank you

[torpid ether]

Just ordered the Respeaker lite and s3

Will give that a try with an external speaker for now and see how it goes

[torpid ether]

https://github.com/formatBCE/Koala-Satellite

This looks super cool too. I'll try the simpler one first, but I'm excited to also try this.

[tranquil anvil]

It seems it is now compatible, I will give it a try

https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/respeaker_xvf3800_xiao_home_assistant/

[calm violet]

Not yet. Wait for the news. 😉

[tranquil anvil]

Ok I didn’t realised you were working on it !

[torpid ether]

I finally got all the parts for respeaker lite. Worked great using your instructions. Can’t wait to try out the 4 mic version.

I am using the 3.5 mm audio jack. It’s replacing my chrome cast and Google home that sat next to my Bose speaker

I just need to figure out a decent case for just the respeaker board so I can set it on top of the Bose

Thanks for all your work!

[calm violet]

Thanks, feedback like this is so important to me!

[calm violet]

XVF software is ready. 🙂
There's some trouble with timers, but overall it works good.

[torpid ether]

Awesome. Is there a repo I should look to for that?

[tranquil anvil]

https://github.com/formatBCE/Respeaker-XVF3800-ESPHome-integration

[torpid ether]

When I get the parts in I will give it a shot with the small form factor esphome s3

[tranquil anvil]

@calm violet mic is working very far away which is super cool. But I noticed that I need to “wait” a little (like 0.5 second) before talking after wake word sound or the speech to text won’t listen to the beginning of the phrase. Did you experience something similar ?
I tried different speech to text engines (speech to phrase, vosk and even home assistant cloud) and I always had to make this small break that makes the conversation “unnatural”

[calm violet]

That's limitation of every ESPHome satellite.
You may turn off the wake sound, it will make it a bit snappier - but you still can't just talk without pause.

[tranquil anvil]

Ok, disabling wake sound make it much more usable ! Maybe I need to configure a really brief wake sound to get best of both worlds

[calm violet]

Probably. The problem with it is that if you don't wait for it to finish (plus some delay) - it will go to STT and screw up your command. 🙂

[tranquil anvil]

I didnt mean not letting it finish, I was meaning setting a 0.1s “beep” to get some sound acknowledgement

Anyway, thx for your work, beam feature and 48k sampling is 🔥

[calm violet]

I just meant that every sound will not only will be played, but also add the delay after (it's in code, you might play with it). 🙂

[tranquil anvil]

Ok, I managed to make it work. I downloaded a 30ms « click » sound and I reduced the delay to 50ms. It now works perfectly. Thx for the insight

[torpid ether]

So here's a question. I have the respeaker setup right now and it works great, but I want to be able to tell it to play music

If I don't specify it should just play music on itself and it shoudl always default to using my music assistant to play the music

I can manually go into music assistant and I can choose and play music on the respeaker, but I can't figure out how to ask the voice assistant to do it for me

Ideally I could ask it to play a spotify radio of my liked music (this would be the default behavior if I just asked it to play music)

or I could ask for a specific song and it would by default use music assistant to try to find it

is something like that possible?

it's the last thing that was super easy with a Google smart home device that i am missing

[calm violet]

Go to MASS Discord, and see this channel: https://discord.com/channels/753947050995089438/1329376019106234439
It's intended to resolve your trouble. 🙂
(I use my own set of scripts, but those are tuned for me)

[torpid ether]

Thank you

[torpid ether]

Do I need to flash the respeaker with new firmware

https://github.com/formatBCE/Respeaker-XVF3800-ESPHome-integration/tree/main

I assume I then also just need to build this and put it on the S3 with my wifi credentials https://github.com/formatBCE/Respeaker-XVF3800-ESPHome-integration/blob/main/config/respeaker-xvf-satellite-example.yaml

[calm violet]

You can just update the ESPHome YAML. It will update your DFU automatically (if you don't already have version with the same numbers like 1.0.5).

[torpid ether]

Thanks! I did flash the esphome yaml and I say it say something about updating from 1.0.4 to 1.0.5 in the logs.