Esp32-s3-box 3 performance disappointing

[Merc]

Hi all,
I got my S3 box today and easily managed to get it running in HA.
However, the performance, specifically the sensitivity of the mic, is abysmal.
I basically have to stand in front of it and shout at it. At that time all other devices get triggered but the S3 not necessarily.

What needs to be done, to turn this into a usable device?

Cheers,

Merc

[pepe59]

I don’t have that problem. Box3 responds well to commands even at a distance of about 5 m with a normally spoken word.

[Stiltjack]

Mine is working pretty well too. Mic sensitivity not as good as Echo devices, but that’s only to be expected.

I’m using the Willow Application Server add-on for speech recognition and Amazon-Polly for TTS (via a Sonos speaker).

Where did you get your Box? Everywhere seems to be sold out.

[Merc]

I bought it through AliExpress.
How did you install yours? I followed the documentation on the HA page…as explained it worked directly but just does not react at all.

[Stiltjack]

There’s a walk through in Community Guides:

Espressif Box devices + Willow Multilingual Voice STT & TTS Home Assistant Add-on How To Configure

For those folks lucky enough to have an Espressif Box3 (order one from AliExpress), you can now try Willow with the new Willow Add-on for HA. Note that this is just the Willow Application Server (WAS) which configures the STT service your Box3 uses and it send your spoken word to the Willow team’s cloud hosted, best-efforts Willow Inference Server (WIS) which then spits it back to HA in under 1 second. You do not need to install a local WIS Inference server for this to work. NOTE: I am not af…

[Merc]

But my issue is not so much that the device does not transport the command (although that also seems a bit sluggish) but more that it does not even wake up.