Why "Prefer handling commands locally" increases the time from ~2.5s to ~52s?

Configuration Voice Assistant
1

I observed that somehow LLM (openai) started to answer with higher waiting times on my Voice PE.

Finally I did more tests tests:

  • Spoken question: (in Romanian): “Daca la sah mut regele o patratica inainte si apoi il mut inapoi, se mai poate efectua rocada mare sau rocada mica?”
    • in English would be: “If in chess I move the king one square forward and then move it back, can I still perform the queenside or kingside castling?”
  • Natural Language Processing times:
    • “Prefer handling commands locally” ENABLED:
      • 53.71 s
      • 59.36 s
      • 42.88 s
    • “Prefer handling commands locally” DISABLED:
      • 2.89 s
      • 1.48 s
      • 3.07 s

Why is “Prefer handling commands locally” consuming SO MUCH time ?
I was expecting a small time increase, but … from ~2.5seconds to ~52 seconds makes me think to disable the option for ever altough I use it a lot … :roll_eyes:

Is it something in my installation only ? Any idea how to debug differently or to improve those times ?

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Screenshot 2025-11-05 003610623×1210 50.3 KB

2

When using that setting your text is first run through the local LLM and first when that fails it is then forwarded to the cloud LLM.
Since local LLM is generally slow, unless you have thrown A LOT of money at it, then it will increase significantly in processing time.

4

Most likely. First, check the system’s performance in another language. Or try another llm integration for your language (e.g., ollama).

5

But the fallback to local processing gets, actually, to the local built-in-sentences recognition , which is not LLM.
I have home assistant yellow, I’m using Home Assistant Cloud for STT, TSS, and OpenAI. Disabling “profer handling commands locally” means that I will use my full cloud support and it works fast. When I enable the local sentence processing (which is not LLM), this makes it to be slow … so it seems not to be related to my openAI LLM (which works ok without the fallback)