First response to VoiceAssistant, after 10 mins of being IDLE, not played out, subsequent responses played out normally

Configuration Voice Assistant
1

Short description:
ESP32 voice assistant satelite is not able to play the response to the first command, after being IDLE for approx 10+ minutes. Responses to subsequent commands are played out normally.

Detailed description:
Using local VoiceAssistant setup:
Installation method: Home Assistant OS
Core: 2025.12.2
Supervisor: 2025.12.3
Operating System: 16.3
Frontend: 20251203.2
Using Local VoiceAssistant in English with
Conversation agent: Home Assistant
STT: faster-whisper
TTS: piper
Tried on ESP32 (no PSRAM), ESP32-S3 and ESP32-P4, both esp-idf and arduino frameworks. The ESP seams not to be the problem since tried to play the media on it after being IDLE for more then 10+ minutes and it works but the response to the first command is still not played out.
Enabled debug logs and no error is logged regarding Home Assistant.
TTS is also without error logs
I found the MP3 file in “\config\tts\2c73552970602ea3b6ba1dc88a40f2a15e78844c_en-gb_8cd8d30e6e_tts.piper.mp3” that contains the audio that should be played but when I go to DEBUG window in Voice Assistant I see in RAW view thet the URL is different “http://192.168.88.79:8123/api/tts_proxy/Q30iMZGwWZmERTcJDKSUNQ.mp3” and it is not working, I am unable to play that audio with the Play button.
On the other hand, after the first command, whose response fails, the subsequent commands response is played normall and for those responses I also finf MP3 files in “”\config\tts" folder and its URL also has a different name for the file but it works, I am able to play it from the Debug menu of Voice Assistant.

2

This may be an answer to a similar but different problem. But I used to get no response from my HAVPE if the message being set was the same message that had previously been sent, and it didn’t matter how long ago the first message was sent. Think ‘someone is at the door’, then I’d get an announcement the first time this happened, but if nothing different was sent to VAPE and then ‘someone is at the door’ was sent again, it would be silent.

In my case the VAPE was being fed from a sensor listening to an MQTT topic.

The solution in my case was to force an update of the sensor and that solved it for me. Perhaps some sort of forced update for the data source may help you?
My yaml below

As I say, this may not be your issue, but thought it wouldn’t harm to suggest it.

alias: Force Update Alexa Sensor
description: Force Update Alexa Sensor - Allows multiple identical messages to be spoken

triggers:
  - trigger: mqtt
    options:
      topic: /alexa
actions:
  - target:
      entity_id: sensor.alexa
    action: homeassistant.update_entity
    data:
      entity_id:
        - sensor.alexa
3

Unfortunatelly this is not the case with me.
Since I am testing this BUG, my every command is “What is the time?” so the response is always different.
The response is generated successfully by TTS, I see the file in the folder but the link to it is not working, not when the response shoud be played nor later in the DEBUG panel.
Does anyone know where and how I can report this bug?

4

Just a datapoint, but I have two HA systems, each with their own VAPE. One of them is rather old and slow, while the other system is newer and faster. I only see this problem with the old and slow one.