I got some Atom Echos, configured them, and they work! I even customized my own wakeword and it worked on the first try. Thanks, Home Assistant team, for such an awesome product as Home Assistant and for fantastic documentation.
Though the Echos and voice recognition works, I’m waiting about 28 seconds between speaking and having Home Assistant respond. “OK Nabu, do the thing”…then I wait ~28 seconds and then at the same time I hear the Echo say “Done” and Home Assistant responds.
Is the delay due to the Echos being small/cheap/slow processors? They react instantly to the wakeword, but perhaps that requires less processing power because it’s trained. Is the delay due to forwarding the audio content of my spoken word over the network to Home Assistant so Whisper can process it? I’m able to transfer other content over my network very quickly, and I doubt the data size of a few spoken words is very large. Is the delay in Whisper processing my spoken command?
What has your experience been with the Echos and openwakeword?
Do you get that kind of delay when you talk to the assistant on your phone or through a browser? It might be whisper taking a while to process it?
What is your home assistant running on?
Also, what’s the range/mic/audio quality like on those atom echos? I’m thinking of looking into something like that now that a decent voice assistant is a possibility.
Not the OP, but commenting on the Atoms. They are good for testing, but not sure I’d want to use them for a full setup.
For one, speakers are pretty rough in them 😂 That’s kinda to be expected though, it’s intended as a cheap dev device.
However, the bigger thing for me is to wait and see what hardware HA will support when they implement on-device wake-word processing. I’d definitely prefer no continuous audio streaming over the network, until after I have said the wake word.
Good questions. I haven’t talked to the assistant through the browser or phone yet -that’s a good way to help narrow down what process might be causing delay.
I’m running HAOS in proxmox on a mini PC with a celeron. A couple people have said they’re using beefy hardware, so I might need a new box.
I don’t yet know the range of these Echoes, but they seem to do a great job listening. They also have a speaker but it sounds super wuiet, not really useful. If I want a verbal response I’ll have to push it through other speakers via an automation.
I had some similar issues with all of my voice recognition / responses being very slow… I am running on home assistant supervised on top of Proxmox. What solved the issue for me was changing the CPU type to ‘host’ in Proxmox. I guess the recognition may rely on some CPU extensions being available.
Good to know!I’m running HAOS on proxmox, too. I’ll look into CPU types.
I picked up an Atom for testing as well. I do get a delay, but definitely not 28 seconds… Maybe more like 4-5?
It’s totally dependent on the speed of the hardware you are running HA on though. Since the microphone is just streaming sound to the server, which then processes it. I’m running on fairly beefy server.
Just for a test, you could also try toggling off the wake word in the Atom Device settings in HA. Then you can send a command by pushing the physical button. Could at least narrow the delay down to wake word processing vs normal speech processing that way?
Excellent troubleshooting tip. Thanks.
super cool! I just really wish the android assistant could use wake words.
Holy crap been looking everywhere for a smart speaker to replace Google Home/Nest speakers. This is the first time hearing Atom Echo and its integration. Definitely going to check this out. Thank you!
Check HA Devs videos called “year of the voice” to know everything you have missed. Also atom echo isn’t really a smart speaker, more a micro with a possible always listening mode
I bought a couple of Echo’s and they are excellent little devices. However, I’m not seeing any delay at all. Probably half a second or less before I get a response. I do find that if its a command I haven’t used before, it can take a few secs, but after that its basically instant. I suspect it is all hardware based as the HA VM is running on some beefy hardware.
An issue I have a lot is the voice breaking up as it talks back to you. Sounds like someone with bad mobile reception. It happens maybe 50% of the time. I figured things would get better as the system gets developed further.
Echo’s
So Echoes ? I think it’s totally okay to just pluralize words like, well, words.
I got an atom echo 2 months ago and was so happy when the wale word was added as before having to press the button and having it tethered defeated the purpose in my opinion.
Using the echo I make sure it’s in the same room as me (on a USB portable charger) and I get maybe a second or two delay. My issue has been setting up custom sentences to control a media player volume, followed their example in the docs for a media player but no errors and no action.
I changed the VM’s CPU type in Proxmox and gave the VM more resources (most of the hosts’s RAM and CPU cores) and the delays cut in half to around 16 seconds. So I know what’s causing my delay (or probably most of it). I guess I need a beefier box.
Just bought an Atom Echo. Can’t wait for it to arrive so that I can give Janet commands.
wondering if all this investment they’re doing on voice is going to have diminishing returns, like, the whole pitch for HA cloud integration is that you could see and use your HA devices with your cloud enabled voice assistant services, right? Nabu Casa makes money for the HA project. is getting rid of the middle man worth it? I needed some first hand experience to convince myself about getting into it or just simply keep paying for NC
(not first hand experience but) Nabu casa is a way to support HA development, having cloud assistant is just a bonus, you also get easy external access and another bonus is that you don’t need to setup the different addons to be able to use assist, while it is doable on something like raspberry 4, problem will be latency compare to nabu casa or you will need a more powerful device to be able to run them smooth. If you didn’t bother to setup cloud assistant by yourself to avoid fees, chances are you will stick to nabu casa and it is a good thing as you are supporting home assistant development.
