I have a problem I did not expect. I have three VPE’s, and I put one in my office, one in the living room, and one in the Kitchen. The Living Room and Kitchen are maybe 5-6 meters apart, and the office about 12 meters down a long hall.
My house is often quiet. If I say “Hey Mycroft” sitting under a meter from the VPE in a quiet voice it often does not hear the wake word, but in a reasonably, conversational voice it does – however one or both of the other two do as well.
As I understand it there’s no prioritization (e.g. by volume) only first-come-wins. If that happens to be the wrong one (maybe a faster network), then the problem is that the STT processing does NOT seem that sensitive, and frequently gets “no text”. I.e. if I look in debug the office says duplicate, the living room may say duplicate, the kitchen says “no text” and nothing happens.
I have reduced wake word sensitivity to “Slightly sensitive” (the lowest). That’s actually bad and why a quiet voice a meter away may fail. But if I set it more sensitive the problem gets worse.
10m should be about 30ms. That SHOULD Be plenty of time to get a consistent winner that is the closest one. My network is pretty flat – wired AP’s all over the place, not over-loaded at all, 1g to the core switch, 10g to the HA server. They are running encrypted API so I’m not sure I can reasonably sniff the traffic to see if the actual earliest arrival is the one chosen (I guess I could un-encrypt it and try).
Am I missing something that might be leading to the “wrong” one being selected?
I can try to increase the gain on the remote VPE’s so they actually hear the command as well (running local OpenAI STT and it has a gain) but that’s not really what I want – I really want the one meter away one to win, not the 10m away one.
Could HA (is it HA?) actually be picking the wrong winner for some reason, something I may not have configured well?
Linwood
