Please also add a switch to mute the speaker(s).
Plug any 3.5mm stereo/mono plug into the ext. speaker socket. That will disconnect the internal speaker.
I think 2 voice-related things could be improved/added:
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Timers. I wish we had maybe Timers item in side panel. So you could set timer from the dashboard too, pause and cancel timers from the dashboard. Set timers beep sound and output speaker.
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Alarm clock. Looks like it’s completely missing in HA. I wish we could set Alarm clock with voice or in dashboard. Like timers it needs a place in side panel too.
There could be indicator on the dashboard if timer or Alarm clock is active.
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Does anyone know one way or the other for sure if the device can initiate conversations via automations or is it strictly always only listening for the wake word to initiate some interaction?
+1 however music playback specific requests are probably better directed to the Music Assistant project (which do share some of the same developers as Home Assistant), check out these existing feature request discussions about ESP32 playback:
I posted this directly related feature request there asking for "Matter Casting " (a.k.a. MatterCast):
There is by the way a good summary of the Music Assistant project in this blog post:
Would it be possible to add “Matter Casting” (a.k.a. MatterCast) audio/music and video player (streaming reciever) for new/upcoming video and music cast standard support in the future?
Please consider researching and planning for adding custom “Matter Casting” (a.k.a. MatterCast) receiver/client for Music Assistant and later in the future also “Matter Casting” streaming service for newer and upcoming connected smart-speakers and smart-displays/televisions (like the latest products from Amazon) that will be able to act as receiver endpoints and audio/music player for “Matter Casting” (a.k.a MatterCast) audio/music and video streaming when those become available. Matter Casting is aimed at democratize local video and audio casting in a universal way that can be supported by all ecosystems and platforms.
- https://www.matteralpha.com/explainer/what-is-matter-casting (Note! unofficial explainer blog)
- What is Matter Casting? | Know-how | matter-smarthome (Note! another unofficial blog)
“Matter Casting” is a new open protocol media streaming standard and the Matter Casting APIs for casting video and audio streams over a local network is only a small part of the currently much-hyped Matter standard suite for IoT which is being led, promoted and developed by the CSA (Connectivity Standards Alliance) and its very impressive list of member companies:
Yep, ffmpeg is used on the HA side to convert all incoming audio into something ESPHome understands (feature not limited to Voice PE)
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Wyoming is an open voice assistant protocol that we created to allow hosting Speech-to-Text etc engines in different processes or hosts (like your beefy server). Voice PE leverages the ESPHome protocol as it’s an ESPHome device. Everything is open and we encourage people and companies to use and integrate them as they wish.
This is not possible yet but planned.
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Home Assistant contains wake word deduplication. Only one device will respond.
I know it is out of scope of this device… but I’d love it to have HDMI output to be able to output HA dashboard to connected TV in somehow standard way, directly from HA 
The RK3588 devices are likely to be a really good solution for that as Collabora supposedly continuing mainline dev as I think even though the intel have great hdmi/video support they lack CEC hmdi control (could be wrong)
The RK3588 does do cec but also it has a HDMI input that is ARC compatible where opensource wireless audio could service all devices.
If you have a Cec device it could know the channel you are on switch to a HA dashboard and on an exit switch back to the original channel or any type of control.
Pi’s have CEC but no ARC and even the PI5 with no hardware encode struggles with 4k.
Collabora are doing some amazing work but its complex and slow especially as Rockchip is not supporting opensource any more. Upstream support for Rockchip's RK3588: Progress and future plans
With intel you can buy an adapter and HDMI-CEC - Home Assistant does have an intergration but don’t see many posts of users using their TV…
Fair enough for this “preview” device, but for the final device release it would be nice not having to add a cinch plug for every single voice device.
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This is THE FINAL device from Nabu Casa for now. What will change and evolve is the software.
Other people might pick up the openly available pcb designs and build other devices based on that.
It’s all in the YouTube video…
FYI, FutureProofHomes has now also announced the final hardware design of their much more advanced ”Satellite1 Dev Kit” (or rather announced a public beta pre-launch with pre-order for their the USA only) so that development board hardware looks fully ready too even if not available to ship as of yet.
As you can see in their video they taken a very different approach by making it modular using a two-board design that seperate the compute board from the voice board, and making it compatible with the Raspberry Pi Zero standard it will be both flexible today and upgradable to other compute boards in the future.
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Okay, not sure if this popped up anywhere else yet, but anyway: coming back to the topic around “switching between internal speaker and 3.5 plug output”. I initially thought that the 3.5mm plug is used in the “oldschool” way, where the signal to the plug by default is connected to the amp for the internal speaker, and only gets disconnected mechanically when a plug is inserted. Luckily enough the VPE uses the same approach as the respeaker_lite: it uses the microphone detection pin of the 3.5mm plug to switch the amp for the internal speaker on and off. The respeaker docs also have the infos how to switch off the plug detection: GitHub - respeaker/ReSpeaker_Lite
The nice thing is that this could technically also be made controllable, via one of the unused gpio pins of the esp and a few parts.
With that it would be possible to use the internal speaker in parallel to the 3.5mm jack, but basically “on demand”, aka: switchable
I didn’t look far enough into the DAC yet, maybe there is also a way to easily switch the signal to the 3.5mm jack on and off, then it should be possible to fully choose which audio-out to use in a given situation without having to plug and unplug the 3.5mm jack: both, only internal, only external, none
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Would probably also be a good idea to make use of that Grove port to connect a relay so can switch off power to the external speaker/reciever when it is not being used.
Maybe a good idea to have a simple way to have a eaxh to use stand-by feature that will power off external speaker/reciever via the Grove port deing for example the night or away mode so external speaker/reciever draw to much power.
I known that having many external speaker/reciever running 24-hours pay day will quickly become expensive in electricity usage.
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I don’t know if it is significant, but there is a sensor in the esphome source which reports whether the speaker is recently plugged or unplugged.
I hope that you really understand that you are comparing apples with pears as you do in the case with google/alexa/siri and the voice PE.