I have set up a fully local AI agent using whisper, piper, ollama over the wyoming protocol.
Works pretty good, but I noticed that the microphone on the Voice Preview Edition isn’t that good. First, I thought my whisper instance must be getting improved, but when using my iPhone via HA App, the voice translation works absolutely great.
Since I’m speaking german I noticed that the PE is recognizing the spoken words pretty badly, so is the output from faster-whisper. So the AI Agent often times doesn’t know what I have said and is trying to find out.
I think this is definitely a problem with the bad microphone on the PE.
So is there an alternative? Using Sonos or an Alexa?
Important thing is that I just want a local execution of whisper. So basicaly I just need to use a good microphone to send the spoken sentences to whisper.
And surely I would need to be able to use a wake word…
My experince so far just like you said was using iphone assist and the microphone there worked great (true that the phone is close when talking) and enjoyed it so much so that i decided to get a microphone or device.
Well let me tell you i am also disappointed after spending like 73 euros on Respeaker with 4 mics and ESP32 , and some 3.5 jack to bluethoot transmiter. The mics only work if i am very close to the device otherwise it dose not interpret what i say correctly. (its true that i don’t speak that loud but it is very silence in my home)
I tested it extensively for 2 days but was expecting it to work better. I am not saying respeaker with 4 mics is bad (haven’t tested it for other purposes only for Home Assistant) but in this use case i don’t know maybe the onboard XMOS stuff is interfering with the sound to much for the STT , i want to use assist more and more and integrated it with all kind of mcp servers but this is a bit of a miss for me sadly.
I did watch out for a lot of devices before buying and initially wanted to spend less but i thought i would use this more and more so i spent a little bit more, i guess if some big brand will jump on Home Assistant that will be the best device until then i doubt any device will work almost as good as an echo dot gen 3. (i am using nvidia parakeet STT btw)