Hello! I’m the author of Kiosk Satellite and would love some feedback from people using Android tablets as Home Assistant displays.
For anyone who hasn’t seen it, it’s an Android app that brings your HA dashboard, hands-free voice control, music playback and photo screensavers together on one device. It runs locally and is free for personal, non-commercial use.
The idea is to make a tablet useful throughout the day, whether you’re controlling your home, asking Assist a question, listening to music or displaying family photos.
Hands-free Assist: With Voice Satellite wake-word detection runs natively and works with the screen off. You can also enable background listening while another app is open. HTTP dashboards work without setting up certificates for microphone access.
Music: Synchronized Music Assistant playback through Sendspin, plus a Now Playing view with album art, controls and supported lyrics. It can also follow a Home Assistant or Sonos player.
Screensavers: Immich albums, local photos and clocks, with motion, face or presence detection to wake the display.
HA controls: Screen controls, volume and device sensors exposed through the built-in ESPHome connection.
Remote setup: Configure the app, view live screenshots and read logs from a browser. There is also fleet management for multiple kiosks.
Camera views: Up to twelve live feeds, with camera imports from Home Assistant or Go2RTC.
It supports Android 7.0 and newer. Download the APK and follow the setup wizard to connect your Home Assistant instance and choose your dashboard. For voice control, install the Voice Satellite integration through HACS too.
Please share your thoughts!
I’d especially like to hear how it works on your hardware. Is setup clear? How does the dashboard perform after running for a while? If you use Voice Satellite with it, does wake-word detection work reliably where your tablet is mounted?
Even if you don’t install it, what would you need from an app like this to consider using it for your wall tablet? If you do give it a try, please include your device model and Android version with your feedback.
Hi! Long time user, and these were some recent thoughts.
Is it possible to set in the settings what entities are exposed to Home Assistant from ESPHome? A lot of the auto-generated entities I don’t find necessary and can clutter my database (like the count of bluetooth devices). I can disable them in HA but it makes it hard when I’m managing a fleet of devices.
In the settings, “Screen and Audio” shouldn’t be one screen; more specifically, I keep looking for the microphone settings to tweak, and I keep not finding it where I think it would be, which is under Voice Satellite.
Not sure how possible this is, but having completely separate devices for Voice Satellite and Kiosk Satellite in HA is getting harder to manage with multiple devices; I keep forgetting if a setting is in the ESPHome device, or in Voice Satellite, etc. Again, now that we have multiple devices in our home, managing all of these entities and settings have become quite cumbersome, even with the new Fleet Management feature.
Also, slightly unrelated, have you tried the new STT feature from HA Labs? They’re supposed to be switching to a different STT provider for Nabu Casa users, and it’s supposed to be MUCH better for STT. However, I’ve found the opposite; it mishears a lot of things, especially one-syllable words, like “On” and “Off.” The docs for this feature implies it might be competing with AGC and Noise Cancellation on devices, and I wonder if we’ll need to use different settings with Kiosk Satellite.
In the settings, “Screen and Audio” shouldn’t be one screen; more specifically, I keep looking for the microphone settings to tweak, and I keep not finding it where I think it would be, which is under Voice Satellite.
I disagree, I’d rather keep all device hardware related settings on its own section. You can always use the search box to look for whatever setting you need.
Not sure how possible this is, but having completely separate devices for Voice Satellite and Kiosk Satellite in HA is getting harder to manage with multiple devices; I keep forgetting if a setting is in the ESPHome device, or in Voice Satellite, etc. Again, now that we have multiple devices in our home, managing all of these entities and settings have become quite cumbersome, even with the new Fleet Management feature.
I totally understand this and I have actually explored having KS do everything that VS does but natively. Unfortunately that would mean abandoning the stand alone Voice Satellite project since I cannot justify maintaining 2 code bases that do exactly the same. This would also mean that anyone that chooses to use a different Kiosk software can no longer use VS and even iOS users would be screwed. Currently the install base of Voice Satellite (around 4000 installs) is far larger than that of Kiosk Satellite.
Also, slightly unrelated, have you tried the new STT feature from HA Labs? They’re supposed to be switching to a different STT provider for Nabu Casa users, and it’s supposed to be MUCH better for STT. However, I’ve found the opposite; it mishears a lot of things, especially one-syllable words, like “On” and “Off.” The docs for this feature implies it might be competing with AGC and Noise Cancellation on devices, and I wonder if we’ll need to use different settings with Kiosk Satellite.
Honestly, no idea. I keep everything local so I use wyoming-onnx-asr with parakeet as my STT service. However, I just released version 2026.9.32 which coincidentally has MASSIVE echo cancellation improvements and now exposes a Noise Canellation toggle, which in previous versions were off by default with no way to enable it.
Is it possible to have a volume slider already visible on the floating player, and also on the Now Playing page? Like it would exist under the progress bar? I find myself needing to quickly manually adjust music volume and it’s requiring multiple taps to get there.
I have it set so when I start playing music, it shows the full-screen Now Playing page. While this is on, and I trigger a voice command, afterwards it returns to the dashboard with the floating player, instead of back to the full-screen Now Playing page.
Is it possible to have a volume slider already visible on the floating player, and also on the Now Playing page? Like it would exist under the progress bar? I find myself needing to quickly manually adjust music volume and it’s requiring multiple taps to get there.
I want to keep the floating player as compact as possible so no volume slider there. But Now Playing already has a volume slider. Tap the volume icon on the far left. It requires 1 tap to show the volume slider.
I have it set so when I start playing music, it shows the full-screen Now Playing page. While this is on, and I trigger a voice command, afterwards it returns to the dashboard with the floating player, instead of back to the full-screen Now Playing page.
Yes, this is a bug already in the list of things to fix.
first off, amazing work. app is great so far, considering moving my Wall dashboard and 2 other Echo Show 8s to this over Fully Kiosk. great job, man.
So I have this running with Voice Satellite on my Echo Show 8 (Lineage), and I was looking to have a comic book style look for the voice overlay skin: white background, black text, and 4 character images anchored to the bottom right of the screen, one per state (idle, listening, processing, responding), so it looks like the character is talking. I have these PNG files available on my HASS server already from a previous project.
I checked the Appearance settings (Skin, Theme mode, Text scale) and don’t see an option for custom images. I also tried injecting CSS through “Inject JavaScript on the HA dashboard” but nothing changed, so it looks like the overlay isn’t part of the dashboard’s DOM and probably renders natively.
Is this possible right now some other way, or is it something you’d consider adding? I have the 4 images ready as transparent PNGs, can convert to another format if needed.
The Voice Satellite skins can’t be changed other than what’s already exposed in the settings. What you have in mind sounds like a fun skin so try sketching something plus upload somewhere the character images and I’ll look into implementing it. You can even chose a custom font that is accessible via Google Font.s
Just make sure that the character images are not copyrighted and, if they are your own creation, you give me permission to distribute them in Voice Satellite.
the images in question might be customized images of a somewhat famous Butler to a vigilante of sorts… my Home Assistant Voice uses a British voice and a custom wake word of “Hey Alfred” if that’s any indication as to whom i am referring…
For the feedback you actually requested, I originally installed your app on my first Echo 8 Lineage, before the update for that was released that gives access to 2GB of RAM instead of just 1GB, and I found it too sluggish. However, with the full 2GB the experience is much better. I will leave it running and let you know how it does over the next few days. Setup was relatively easy, love that you have a lot of solid options built in like the screensaver and entities and MA support so I can see my queue while listening.
Voice is working well, seems to pick up my wake word (custom and running on HA though), and response time is similar to my voice PE…
and i love the remote operation option so i can set it up from my laptop. You’ve got a lot of great ideas here.
Ok first thing first - amazing job. After trying it last night for an hour, it gave me confidence to retire Fully Kiosk on my 5 dashboards around the house and use this great app. The detail in every setting is amazing, even immich on the screensaver. Well done.
Question: on our living room dashboard, I have Fully Kiosk which shows HA. After 2 min of inactivity, Fully goes to the screensaver and loads my Immich photos (immich-kiosk to be more specific). If there is no motion or anything, the tablet screen turns off. If motion is detected, the tablet screen turns on and shows the Immich photos. The moment we touch the screen, it goes back to the HA dashboard.
How can I achieve this exact behaviour with HA-kiosk? I can see different bits and pieces are there, but it looks like I’m missing something and can’t make the tablet turn off the screen.
P.s. Man, when I saw there’s a setting that I can define double click to go from screensaver back to HA, which gives me an opportunity to interact with the screensaver, it gave me shivers!
Thanks for the work on this! I hadn’t seen this before but I switched two of my tablets over from Fully Kiosk Browser this weekend. Fully Kiosk browser works well but this is much more geared towards Home Assistant and has more relevant features.
I’m thinking about trying it on some older Fire tablets I have mounted in the wall too to see if they can handle it.
i’m still blown away by how much better this is overall on the Echo Show 8 Lineage with the full RAM being used. been running flawlessly on 2 Echo’s for the past couple of days. I was able to setup the 2nd device quickly using the export/import feature, and I’m considering trying out the Fleet option once i get my other Echo setup and running.
is there any option for importing our own micro or openwakewords so i can take advantage of the on device wakeword detection instead of streaming to HASS?
@matlo83 Of course, check the wake word documentation in the Voice Satellite repo. You have to copy your custom models into a specific folder and then reload the Voice Satellite integration or restart HA.
thanks! i should have looked there first. easily accomplished. If anybody wants additional wakewords, i have “Hey Alfred”, “Alfred”, and “Computer” available and can send them over.
@jxlarrea I have now removed View assist.
What I have is Show 8 with LineageOS 18.1
Installed version 2026.9.48 up and running (armeabi-v7a)
Enabled remote control (working) and visible in HA through ESPHome as well.
HA with 2026.9.2
questions I have:
• Can’t grant: “display over other apps permission missing” - > I get a message in Lineage that this function is not available- DO I need to worry for this?
• I have 3 media players with the device: (MA, ESPHome and Voice Satelite).
Which one shall I use and is Sendspin used by default?
I get in the logs the error:
19:56:46 sendspin: queue watcher connect failed: HandshakeException: Handshake error in client (OS Error: WRONG_VERSION_NUMBER(tls_record.cc:127))
• System UI guard - > Hit open settings on device, but does not jump to the configuration menu to enable it and I don’t know which option is this (I have enabled Start on boot and act as the home screen)
• Can’t grant: “display over other apps permission missing” - > I get a message in Lineage that this function is not available- DO I need to worry for this?
LineageOS doesnt expose that permission in its UI but it can be granted via adb, you can either ignore it or grant all permissions via ADB as explained in the docs.
I have 3 media players with the device: (MA, ESPHome and Voice Satelite).
Which one shall I use and is Sendspin used by default?
Kiosk Satellite only exposes 1 media player, Sendspin, which is picked up by Music Assistant automatically in the network, If it doesn’t then manually enter the server address in the Sendspin player settings. ESPHome doesnt expose any media player and Voice Satelite is its own thing (browser based)
This is the Sendspin player trying to talk to Music Assistant to grab any existing music queue for it. That’s a TLS negotiation error. For some reason the server offered a TLS version that the old LineageOS version on the Echo Show doesnt support. I’ve seen this happen before but usually a Kiosk Satellite restart (or reboot) gets rid of it.
my Home Assistant Voice uses a British voice and a custom wake word of “Hey Alfred” if that’s any indication as to whom i am referring…