I know wake word detection doesn’t work yet. But I’m trying to think about what hardware I’ll need to have when it does eventually work.
Since Raspberry devices re so hard to come by, I’m REALLY hoping there will be other options.
Are there plans to enable wake word detection in the HA companion app? That would ideal as an old android phone could be used as a smart speaker complete with a dashboard for HA.
Or will I need to acquire some ESP devices? If so, any ideas which ones will be needed?
Will wake word detection require Internet connection? I hate the idea of depending on outside services (including the ISP itself).
If I were you I’d wait. Don’t buy anything until this feature is released. It may be based on one of the services Rhaspy uses, but we don’t know yet. See https://rhasspy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/wake-word/
For whole room monitoring you will likely need a mic array like the ReSpeaker. But again, we don’t know yet.
There is certain features lacking in the current setups.
The hardware is still lacking good microphones and the software is lacking features, like echo cancellation, beam forming and other features.
The software parts is already supported by hardware, but nobody has coded the software parts yet.
The microphones technology is there too, but the price has been too high, because the products are made for other situations, like concerts or professional broadcasting, and not hobby voice assistants.
I’ll definitely wait. But I do tend to try and plan ahead for the possibilities based on what I think/hope will happen. It helps to figure out what kind of budget I can expect to need. That way I’m (hopefully) not totally blown out of the water when the time does come to buy the needed elements.
I, for one, hope that I’ll be able to use android phones for this purpose even if I need to somehow supplement with external microphones.
I was able to setup an app to send audio over the websockets to Home-Assistant. Using Porcupine to detect a wake word and send the audio to a voice assistant pipeline.
Since this post is one of the first results on Google for this topic I just wanted to bump this to point out that running hotword detection locally on an Android tablet or phone is already possible using other applications. I’m using tasker with a hotword plugin to call the HA apps assist service when it hears the hotword, it’s fast, seamless, and fairly accurate. Check my profile for a post where I go into the setup in more detail.