Voice Chapter 7 - Supercharged wake words and timers

Blog
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Micro Wake Word v2 coming on the ATOM in the next ESPHome release. In three weeks :wink:

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The device is already in an area. Always has been. I had inferred that the timers were tied to device / area but my ESP32-Box S3 still states that it’s not supported on the device :frowning:

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I’ve been testing timers on wyoming satellite for a month now. They work well, but some options are missing, such as the ability to stop the timer signal.
But on this broadcast, I saw that there is a graphical interface for them.
Is there information on how to access created timer entities? Then it would be possible to create a card on dashboard, or display information on the addressable LED strip or something else.

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I’m looking forward to see the hardware selection evolve, it seems like software side of things is exploding right now!

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It appears to me that the implementation of the timers is in the ESPHome voice assistant itself - is this correct?

If this is the case, can those timers be accessed by HA? Can they be controlled by the OpenAI conversation agent (or only by the Home Assistant Conversation agent)?

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Any work being done to also make ESPHome based voice-assistant devices better media player recievers with native support for featues such a multi-room and syncronized Hi-Fi quality playback?

Not sure if you ”voice” developers are involved in the development of media player pipelines that can also be used for native music playback, however think music playback is a very important feature for voice assistent devices and heard Paulus Schoutsen at Nabu Casa’s reveal specification of their voice-assistant hardware project on Home Assistant’s ESPHome Summer Release Party on YouTube where he said that Nabu Casa’s ESPHome developers are working on a new open-source hardware platform for their voice-assistant products that will based on ESP32-S3 in combination with a very powerful XMOS xCORE chip for audio processing.

I think similar xCORE chips from XMOS is by the way used in Amazon Alexa Voice Service (AVS) Development Kit(s) and Amazon Echo products, as such it could become exellent high-quality reciever and music playback devices too.

(I am unsure of it I would suspect that Google Nest / Google Home smart speaker series also contain XMOS xCORE chip?)

Anyway, since Nabu Casa’s designs it said to be open-source hardware and XMOS integration I would guess that native support for it will probably be added to the ESPHome’s Media Player Components (and Microphone Components), so I for one am hoping that could and will be extended to other type of audio output and audio input solutions and not only for voice-assistant.

Thus wondering if ESPHome voice assistent combined hardware and firmware platform will also be great for music playback if high-quality amplifier and speakers are used?

Personally I would also love to see speakerless network-streamer player/receiver hardware without microphones but only with with AUX-out that can connect to any of your existing amplifiers or speakers with built-in amplifiers in order to replace products like Chromecast Audio and Amazon Echo Input / Echo Link Amp, (e.i. devices with no on-board speakers that must be connected to external speakers for audio output

That is, I am sure that not everyone only wants “smart speakers” with voice-assistant and that instead many would be also happy to have network streamers/players without microphone which only purpose is to receive and output highest quality audio possible from Music Assistant to your “dumb” speakers.

I for one still have loads of Chromecast Audio audio-only receivers connected to various models of different speaker system in each room used to achieve multi-room music playback on a budget (because could not afford Sonos speakers in all rooms).

So even if though Nabu Casa’s hardware will initially primarly be designed for “Home Assistant Satellite” (also known as “Wyoming Satellite”) for voice-assistant appliances, such open-source hardware it just like the ESPHome firmware does have a lot of potential for different use cases:

I do however think that such a solution does need its own non-propriatory audio-only streaming protocol for high-quality music streams?

PS: Just as cool would it be with network streamer receiver hardware with AUX-input and ADC to get music from analog audio source, see:

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27

When i ask my assist to start a timer, it acknowledges that it started a timer, but i am not getting any indication when the timer is done. Is there something i need to do for this?

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how do i stop a timer on a raspberry pi wyoming satellite

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I can get things like “Turn on [a] light in 30 seconds” to work with the timer-finished tone at the end of the 30 seconds and the action completed. But “Create a timer for 30 seconds” does not give any indication that it has finished.
Wyoming satellite

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I keep reading “$13 Atom Echo” but isn’t most of Home Assistant dev based in Europe (or used to be)? Maybe even the majority of users (would be curious what the global shares are :slight_smile: ).

I am wondering because I have yet to find such a cheap offer in Europe. Cost seems to be roughly double that, which is not really cheap for an unpretty little device that serves only that one purpose.

Does anybody know if this constantly quoted price is possible anywhere in Europe?

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I can’t speak to if that price is possible in Europe, but given the stats it does look like a very, very largest portion of installs is United States followed rather closely by Germany which would explain why things are regularly talked about using $ for the pricing.

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The stats you linked show much more installation on Europe than in US. Germany and France alone are more than US. I’m not going to count every country, but it seems Error might have triple US number or higher. That’s quite interesting.

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I suspect it’s $13 without sales tax, which is not how prices are presented in Europe. Anyway, here I could find it cheapest for almost $16.

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You are 50 percent further than me, i am told the timer has started, or the command was received, but i have no indication when the timer is done, and the command is never executed. Not sure if i need to do anything or just be patient with the next build.

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So a bit more on this, if i ask for a command to be done in 1 minute, it completes the command after a minute. If i ask for the command to be done in 2 minutes it does Not execute the command. :thinking:

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Does anyone know how to see the assist events through the event bus? Docs say they are available, but I only see them through assist debugging

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Timers are now working properly for me.

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Did you do anything, or just install the July build of HA?

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Just installed the latest version of HA

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I recognize details are still sparse, but I’m wondering if the HA voice kit product discussed at the end of the livestream is also planned as a speaker that playback from Music Assistant could be piped to?

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