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?

  • @plasticcheeseEnglish
    2•8 months ago

    I bought a couple of Echo’s and they are excellent little devices. However, I’m not seeing any delay at all. Probably half a second or less before I get a response. I do find that if its a command I haven’t used before, it can take a few secs, but after that its basically instant. I suspect it is all hardware based as the HA VM is running on some beefy hardware.

    An issue I have a lot is the voice breaking up as it talks back to you. Sounds like someone with bad mobile reception. It happens maybe 50% of the time. I figured things would get better as the system gets developed further.