ESP32 S3 Box 3: Why is this so difficult?!

Configuration Voice Assistant
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source on ESPHome-firmware/voice-assistant/esp32-s3-box-3.yaml at 0fe1bcec60bfc415dc793357783a28685e95dc1e · D3SOX/ESPHome-firmware · GitHub is already patched, use that one.

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Thank’s! Do I need to write something? Wifi password something like that?

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I finally got my ESP32-S3-BOX-3 and whacked the standard yaml on with only two changes:

micro_wake_word_model: hey_jarvis

wifi:
  ssid: !secret wifi_ssid
  password: !secret wifi_password

I have 3 separate issues:

  1. Speaker doesn’t work. Known issue and I’ll try downgrading firmware to 4.4.6 as recommended above.

  2. Microphone is pretty bad. I tried talking to it from 2m away in a quiet room and it didn’t hear me. I had to be 0.5m away and even then it didn’t hear me sometimes. Is this also a bug in recent firmware?

  3. It takes aaaaaaaaaaages to acknowledge my command. I know my back-end (whisper & piper) is fine because if I trigger Assist on my phone and say “turn on lights”, it takes 3-4s at most. When I do it via my ESP32-S3-BOX-3, it takes around 20s! Could this be a configuration issue or just the way it is?

Appreciate any guidance with this!

EDIT: Setting ESP32 framework version to 4.4.6 broke my microphone too, until I downgraded my ESPHome docker container to version 2024.4.2. Now both mic and speaker work, and it takes 4-5s to complete a simple command, which is comparable to using my phone.

So the primary issue I’m left with is the wake word. It just doesn’t seem responsive at all, I always have to say it about 5-6 times even when only 20cm away. Any tips for this?

4 Likes
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Any updates on this? I just set one up and no sound.

Edit - Has sound but extremely muted. I can’t figure out how to adjust volume, nor use as a smart speaker.

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Late June and I’m stuck in exactly the same frustrating position. Bought an S3-Box-3 because HA were effectively pushing it on the site. Voice Assistant initially worked, then after an hour or so the microphone stopped responding. I managed to get the temperature, humidity and (terrible) presence sensors working, but nothing I do seems to bring back a functional microphone. So frustrating.

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Same here, 3 of them “bricked” and waiting for the fixed upgrade.
Hopefully it’s not a hardware problem.

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look at this firmware it’s great

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BigBobbas/ESP32-S3-Box3-Custom-ESPHome: Custom ESPHome config for ESP32-S3-Box-3 with sensors and touchscreen (github.com)

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Much better, now there is a touchscreen with controls.
Thank you, will play with it and configure buttons.

Voice however is not working still, I’m beginning to think the HASS / Openwakeword or something there is bugged at the moment on my side.

Either way, I always wanted it to be a control screen primarily. Was disappointed to see that the HASS Voice firmware was a pure screen only with no templates like this firmware has.
Appreciated.

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I’ve been having the same issues. On their demos it seems to work flawlessly, I wonder if there are other things that are running that are taking up memory.
Additionally for me, when I changed the wake word model it did this weird thing where it wouldn’t respond to ‘hey Jarvis’, but I had to say ‘ok Nabu’ right after saying hey Jarvis to get it to start listening, if I kept repeating either of those commands or wouldn’t work.