I got some Atom Echos, configured them, and they work! I even customized my own wakeword and it worked on the first try. Thanks, Home Assistant team, for such an awesome product as Home Assistant and for fantastic documentation.

Though the Echos and voice recognition works, I’m waiting about 28 seconds between speaking and having Home Assistant respond. “OK Nabu, do the thing”…then I wait ~28 seconds and then at the same time I hear the Echo say “Done” and Home Assistant responds.

Is the delay due to the Echos being small/cheap/slow processors? They react instantly to the wakeword, but perhaps that requires less processing power because it’s trained. Is the delay due to forwarding the audio content of my spoken word over the network to Home Assistant so Whisper can process it? I’m able to transfer other content over my network very quickly, and I doubt the data size of a few spoken words is very large. Is the delay in Whisper processing my spoken command?

What has your experience been with the Echos and openwakeword?

  • ArmoredCavalryEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    I picked up an Atom for testing as well. I do get a delay, but definitely not 28 seconds… Maybe more like 4-5?

    It’s totally dependent on the speed of the hardware you are running HA on though. Since the microphone is just streaming sound to the server, which then processes it. I’m running on fairly beefy server.

    Just for a test, you could also try toggling off the wake word in the Atom Device settings in HA. Then you can send a command by pushing the physical button. Could at least narrow the delay down to wake word processing vs normal speech processing that way?