My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant

Re:My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voi... by jcims on Monday March 16, 2026 @10:21AM (#47399449)

I have a feeling beamforming microphone arrays might help here, something like this could improve the audio being processed substantially - https://www.minidsp.com/products/usb-audio-interface/uma-8-m....

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Re:My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voi... by ethagnawl on Monday March 16, 2026 @12:50PM (#47401469)

That's a good call. I have a PS3(?) mic/camera that I was using when I was running the original Mycroft project on a Pi. I wonder if that would help with the inbuilt HA mic not waking for most of my family, most of the time. I will have to look at my VA Preview device and its specs later because I'm not sure if you can connect an external mic to it out-of-the-box.

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Re:My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voi... by IshKebab on Monday March 16, 2026 @11:39AM (#47400455)

Alexa devices have these (or used to at least), but Google Home's never did. So it shouldn't be necessary.

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Re:My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voi... by jcims on Monday March 16, 2026 @12:05PM (#47400836)

Yeah a small (ideally personalized) wakeword model would probably outperform just about any audio wizardry.

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