Is it possible to somehow create a voice assistant with Whisper, openWakeWord, and Piper by connecting a microphone and speakers to a NUC running HAOS? Without any external devices like ESP32?
Possible. Probably.
Practical. Not at all. You’re building everything from scratch and the mic experience will be poor at best unless you spend more on far field mics than you’d spend on a proper voice satellite. Id suggest Put the nuc somewhere out of reach and put together a proper satellite or get a VPE.
Thank you for the answer!
Is there any proper satellite that you could recommend?
Yeah a good microphone array makes a difference.
Probably one easy way to test is to get a good USB microphone and plug it into the machine with the web browser that you use as the UI to your HA. Pull up the voice text dialog box that has a microphone option and try out the mic both close up and several feet away.
If it works reasonably well, then yeah maybe try it out with your NUC. There is a USB Microphone AddOn that some people use to incorporate the mic into HA (I’ve not tried it myself). Here is just an example I googled and found.
Okay, I’ve just tried that solution because someone recommended the exact same thing on Reddit and it worked. However, I’m currently looking for a better microphone and I’m even considering buying an HA VPE, because my current microphone is literally the first decent one from Amazon for about $2, and practically nothing I say is well recognized by Whisper.
I should have mentioned this, but the other important factor is the Speech-To-Text model that one uses. Some of the ones I have tried are OK, but not great. Others are actually pretty good but come at the expensive of compute power which, depending on your machine, can take several seconds.
But for comparison, using the same “pretty good” model, my HA VAPE does much better than a cheap microphone I use with my PC.
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