Hi everyone!
I’ve been experimenting with creating custom wake words for voice assistant functionality in Home Assistant. While it’s still far from perfect, I’ve managed to create a Swedish wake word, “Hasse”, which I think could be useful for other Swedish or Nordic users. My hope is both for this to be useful to someone else and not just me but also that maybe someone would be able to improve on this?
Why “Hasse”?
Home Assistant is often nicknamed “HASS,” which sounds very similar to the Swedish name “Hasse.” My wake word is simply “Hasse”, without any prefixes like “Hey” or “OK.” You can just say:
“Hasse, turn on the lights” (“Hasse, tänd lamporna”)
or
“Hasse, set the temperature to 20 degrees.”, (“Hasse, sätt temperaturen på 20 grader”)
Technical Details
I used OpenWakeWord and followed the Google Colab notebook provided in the official guide. Since the Colab currently only supports English, I had to get creative with phonetic spelling to approximate the Swedish “Hasse.”
The best phonetic match I found was “hass-heh”. By adjusting the sensitivity to a very high level, I’ve achieved reliable activations without false positives.
Results
I’ve trained two versions of the wake word:
- Small Training Set: Surprisingly, this smaller model performs slightly better in my experience.
- Large Training Set: Somewhat surprisingly less consistent in activations but also seems to have fewer accidental / false activations.
Both versions work decently well, though the smaller model seems more slightly better.
I’d love to hear feedback or ideas for improving the model, especially from anyone who has tried similar setups or know how to properly tweak the Colab!
I hope this inspires other Swedish or Nordic Home Assistant users to experiment with custom wake words! Let me know if you try it out or have suggestions for improvement.