If you’re using the Home Assistant voice assistant mechanism (not Alexa/Google/etc.) how’s it working for you?
Given there’s a number of knobs that you can use, what do you use and what works well?
- Wake word model. There’s the default models and custom
- Conservation agent and model
- Speech to text models (e.g. speech-to-phrase or whisper)
- Text to speech models


In Home Assistant, in the settings, if you go to Voice Assistants then click the … on your assistant and click Debug, you can see what it thought you said (and what it did).
Setting a timer on an up to date Home Assistant will repeat back what it set. E.g. If I say “Set a timer for 2 minutes” it will say “Timer set for 2 minutes”. It says “Done” when running some Home Assistant task/automation, so it’s probably not understanding you correctly (hence what the debug option is good for). I use the cloud voice recognition as I couldn’t get the local version to understand my accent when I tried it (a year ago). It’s through Azure but is proxied by Home Assistant so they don’t know it’s you.
My wife swears it’s sexist, she has a bit of trouble too. In the integration options you can set the sensitivity to make it more sensitive, but it does increase false activations. I have it on the most sensitive and she can activate it first time most of the time.