Troubleshooting Openwakeword / voice assistant

[jagged edge]

Hi All,

First, my config:

Raspberry Pi 5 Model B 8GB

Installation method Home Assistant OS
Core 2025.9.2
Supervisor 2025.09.0
Operating System 16.2
Frontend 20250903.5

I have followed the below tutorial
https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/voice_remote_local_assistant/

My OpenWakeWord does not seem to be responding, and I am not sure where I can go to test things.

If I try the Start Conversation from the 3 dots beside my voice assistant, from my PC dashboard and click the 'Start listening' microphone Icon I usually get:
No text recognised.
Without clicking the icon, I try the wake word and again, nothing. (not sure if that is even supposed to work in that context.)

I can type commands like, turn off the office lights, and turn on the office lights and that works.

I can hear the voice assistant speak when I click on the try voice

I do have a USB microphone dongle in the Raspberry Pi, and have also set Assist Microphone to USB PnP Sound Device Mono

I even have a script that will play TTS to speakers, and this works with the voice model too

sequence:

• action: tts.speak
  metadata: {}
  data:
  cache: true
  media_player_entity_id: media_player.tts_targeted_speakers
  message: >-
  Testing, 1, 2, 3. I am trapped in the speaker, send help.
  options:
  voice: en_US-lessac-medium
  language: en_US
  target:
  entity_id: tts.piper
  alias: TTS_Testing
  description: ""

Some questions I need to ask for clarification.

1. When loading the HA dashboard in a browser on a Windows machine and I try to test voice (start conversation). It uses my default PC speakers to output so I am going to guess it also uses my default PC microphone ? And carrying that assumption forward, when trying from iPhone using the assist widget, same deal, phone hardware.

2. What is the normal way to trigger interaction / listen to my voice to chat from the HA dashboard when on a PC?

3. Where do I go from here to troubleshoot?

Thank you

[acoustic lotus]

for PC mic, you need to have https enabled for server address, not that easy to do. Should work with USB mic connected directly to server, but never did it, so can't really help much