i just wanted to start building my wyoming satellite on a raspberry pi and beforehand i tried out the whisper STT on my Home ASsistant VOice Assist to see if it is good for German.
Turns out it is not… The sentences are formatted horribly and some words are not even understood correctly. Choosing the HA Cloud STT is 100% working so far.
So the problem now is: would it then even make any sense to use a local assist if i cant even use Whisper for German?.. kinda frustrated cause i have been looking forward to building it.
On top of that btw: piper TTS is just as horrible for German… especially the “Thorsten” Voice…
I’ve reached slightly better German speech recognition results using the guillaumekln/faster-whisper-small Whisper model from HuggingFace, with a Beam Size of 3:
You can edit these under Settings → Add-Ons → Whisper → Configuration. YMMV—I’m currently experimenting with the small model.
For TTS, I found any Piper voice except Thorsten unusable—many produce some Danish-sounding gibberish, especially on short sentences. I’d have preferred a female voice but it seems Thorsten is the only one really trained for German (thanks to Thorsten for making his work and his voice so freely available for us!).
Note: I found Raspberry Pi’s much too slow for actual work, so I run my HA (and Whisper & Piper) on a Proxmos VM on a more beefy machine. For a Wyoming satellite though, a Raspi Zero 2 W should be fine. A 64-bit OS is needed, and I’d recommend using the ReSpeaker 2-Mic Pi HAT.
