Hello everyone,
This is my first post on the Home Assistant Community forum, so please let me know if this topic would be better placed in another category.
I recently received an email from Picovoice stating that their Free Tier will be discontinued on June 30, 2026, and that existing Free Tier AccessKeys will be disabled.
Since I use Porcupine as the wake word engine for my Home Assistant voice setup, I contacted Picovoice to clarify what this means for existing local/offline deployments.
Their response was:
The AccessKey is validated when the engine is initialized, before offline data processing, and is also used to enforce usage limits. The SDK does not run without a valid key. After Free Tier AccessKeys are disabled on June 30, 2026, features using those keys will stop working.
Going forward, we'll be focusing on our core business, enterprise deployments. There is no non-commercial tier planned.
So, unless something changes, it appears that existing Home Assistant installations using Porcupine with Free Tier AccessKeys will stop working after June 30, 2026.
I'm particularly interested because I've found Porcupine to be significantly more reliable than OpenWakeWord for custom Japanese wake words in my environment. I tested OpenWakeWord in the past, but the recognition rate was not good enough for daily use.
I'm curious:
- Are others here affected by this change?
- What alternatives are you considering?
- Has anyone had good results with OpenWakeWord for non-English custom wake words?
- Are there other wake word engines worth looking at for Home Assistant voice setups?
I'd appreciate hearing about real-world experiences, especially from users running local voice assistants and custom wake words.
Thanks!