Hi, I have a spare Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W that I am trying to repurpose to a local voice assistant that connects to a OpenAI compatible endpoint. What is the current recommended audio hardware/HAT for this purpose?
I googled and the first result is Respeaker from Seeed Studio. However the product seems to be deprecated (source) and people have difficulty compiling the drivers for the latest version of Rasberry Pi OS. Their newer product Respeaker Lite seems to be for ESP32.
Is there a better alternative?
Good choice - do not use rb pi zero 2w. for wyoming satellite it is better to use devices with good wifi or with a wired interface. instead of simple microphones it is better to use usb speakerphone with built-in noise reduction.
In principle, there are no restrictions, you can use any audio device that you can install in the system. Or even an external microphone from a surveillance camera (using go2rtc).
But the basic pi zero 2 w + 2-Mics Pi HAT setup will give you a worse experience than the esp32S3 satellite (~10$), at a higher price and power consumption.
I am still using a RasPi Zero W and reSpeaker 2-mic HAT as a Rhasspy voice satellite with Home Assistant … it does do the basic job, but I have not recommended it for a few years.
The Raspberry Pi is enough for basic wakeword - but the ESP32-S3 has additional instructions built into the silicon to accelerate AI functions which, along with the XMOS XU-316 AI (xCORE XU316) dedicated DSP (Digital Signal Processor), significantly improve sound quality and hence voice recognition.
The seeed reSpeaker 2-mic HAT really let it down. Seeed documentation for reSpeaker gives a couple of demos for advanced functions - that the supplied driver does not support. In fact despite the reSpeaker having 2 mics, the driver only uses one. Unfortunately the other similar products in the market (eg Adafruit Voice Bonnet) suffer from using the same driver. And then there’s the fact that instead of keeping the driver up-to-date with later linux kernels, they just told users to to stick with the version of Raspbian OS from 2018. One individual user, HinTak (not an employee), was updating the driver to work with newer kernels - but the lack of support from seeed or the wider community made it a dead end.
A year or so ago i did try to upgrade to HA Voice Assist, but ended up putting it aside and going on to another project. Now that my greenhouse is almost finished i am looking forward to having another go - this time purchasing a HA Voice assist PE, reinstalling HAOS with Voice Assistant and the PE, then trying to update my RasPi satellites into the new system, and maybe having a go at building my own PE-style voice assistant.
I have seen the seeed reSpeaker Lite and wonder how long before seeed stop supporting it … though it looks as though the wider community here are actively working with it. Maybe reSpeaker lite will be worthwhile.
Now that I have got into ESP32 and ESPHome i also have a spare Raspberry Pi waiting for some project suited to that sweet spot between a microcontroller and a full PC or virtual machine.
Can a defective speaker fry the reSpeaker 2-mic HAT? I re-installed yesterday and everything worked fine, including output via headphone. As soon as I plugged in a passive speaker on the speaker plug, the HAT and its devices disappeared. I’ve tried to re-install all day today, using different mSD cards, but the plugHW devices remain gone. I suspect the old speaker shorted, but would that destroy the HAT?