Yes, how do I approach that? I’m pretty new to this and I don’t understand what it can and what it can not listen for.
In other words, I would have thought that the Assist where I type in the words, would be the tool I could use to see if what I would say would be possible for it to listen to. How do I know which words it can hear and make sense of?
It should be able to listen for those words, it’s just not understanding you. It may be due to your accent, not speaking loud enough, or whatever other reason.
To make sure that that’s indeed your issue, you should try to use a cloud-based stt to see if that works correctly.
Thank you all. Got it working. … most of the time.
TIPS learned I think:
Talk faster. Say “OK NABU OPEN GATE LEFT” quickly.
If no response from speaker box, then say it again. Only if it replies “Turned on the switch” do I know it worked.
After saying “OK NABU” do not wait until the ring of lights change/flash before speaking the desired command. Instead speak the command immediately after saying “OK NABU”. In other words say “OK NABU OPEN THE GATE”, not “OK NABU … OPEN THE GATE”. At least that’s what I’ve found to be true so far. I’m not 100% sure this matters, but it seems to.
When it’s not working, and reporting that it can’t understand you, you kind of want to talk to it like it’s stupid (LOL!), i.e. slow it down, say each word deliberately, but actually it might make more sense to just try your best to voice it normally as you might to a neighbor.
Also in my case I have a dual momentary electrical relay device with a LEFT and RIGHT channel which electrically pulses the gate open/close trigger wires. This device name that causes the gate to trigger is thus called “GATE LEFT” (with a space in it). (The GATE RIGHT is not currently used.) But for whatever reason no matter how carefully I spoke “GATE LEFT” it could not be understood.
The solution I found was to give ‘Gate Left’ an Alias. (go to: Settings | Voice Assistant | Expose).
First I tried the alias “test”. Once I got that working (and settled down from the happy dance), I changed it to “Gate”. That did not work, even though I tested it many times. Then I changed it to “gate” (lower case), and that worked. Why? Strange.
So I changed it back to “Gate” (capitalized) and every so often it would work. ??? I think the upper/lower case probably doesn’t matter. I suspect that perhaps ‘Gate left’ is getting confused with ‘Gate’, I don’t know. Or perhaps there is just too much noise or chaos.
Amazingly at this point speaking “OK NABU open gate left” worked. (I’m guessing it triggered on “OK NABU open gate” and ignored the trailing “left”. At this point I tried removing the “gate” alias, and it went back to failing all of the time. So in fact it seems to use the single work alias “gate”, and ignores extra words at the end.
Whatever the case maybe someday I can figure out how to see more clearly exactly what it is seeing so that debugging this is less of an art and more of a science.
One thing I noticed in it’s behavior, was that after I changed the alias, like from “test” to “gate”, when I next issued a OK NABU… voice command, there was a significant delay and flashing of the ring of lights in the Voice preview box, apparently as it uploaded new sounds to the box before it could test what I had spoken to it. … And the first voice test with this delay always seemed to fail, but that could just be chance, more testing will tell.
and manually type in these same words it actually properly opens or closes the gate:
