Voice Pipeline Busy Error

[gray dome]

My Home Assistant Voice PE has been working fine for about a year. Recently, it stopped responding. It completes the command, for example, turn on the kitchen lights, but it says nothing. I get lots of errors like this in my logs:

"Home Assistant Voice 099bb4: [E][http_media_source:111]: Cannot play 'http://<IP>:8123/api/tts_proxy/XVCm0FO4aJIuzdVR09Q45g.flac' on pipeline 1: pipeline is busy"

I also get these in the log:

"Home Assistant Voice 099bb4: [W][micro_wake_word:353]: Wake word detection is already running"

If I unplug and reconnect the Home Assistant Voice PE device, it will respond to the very first thing I ask. But then it stops responding and the log fills up with "pipeline is busy" messages. Here are my versions:

Installation method
Home Assistant OS
Core
2025.12.5
Supervisor
2025.12.3
Operating System
16.3
Frontend
20251203.3

And voice:

Home Assistant Voice PE by Nabu Casa
Firmware: 25.12.1 (ESPHome 2025.12.1)

Any ideas? How can I debug this?

[gray dome]

This got solved over on the reddit forum.

https://github.com/esphome/home-assistant-voice-pe/releases

Evidently release 25.12.4 fixed this. I took control of my Home Assistant Voice PE in ESPHome Device Builder, compiled, and deployed. The problem was resolved.

[cunning wasp]

in general unless your actively customising the firmware you should not "take control".
if it fixes your problem for now then that's great. however in the future when stock updates are available you should consider removing it from the builder tool and flashing back to stock firmware to ensure a stable state. (THIS tool following THESE instructions)

[gray dome]

Thank you. That's very helpful.

[cunning wasp]

no worries. just something to keep in mind for the future to avoid other issues.