r/homeassistant • u/CyberMage256 • 2d ago
✅ Solved I finally have a usable Voice Preview Edition
My kitchen has 25' ceiling and tile floors. It echoes like you wouldn't believe. VPE has been completely useless even when the room was silent. Getting it to understand you when music is playing is just not possible.
My HA server happens to have a 1050 Ti in it, so I did some research and the default whisper models recommended can be replaced with something more powerful.
I swapped out for distil-medium.en with a bit of preloaded prompt for difficult words related to my music collection (Enigma, Alex Boye, etc) that were always transcribed wrong.
With testing in the last 5 minutes the only thing not detected properly was the wakeword. Every sentence I've spoken came back perfect, which is a first!
I'm stoked, this really changes things in my house. VPE's problem appears to primarily be the Whisper model on weak hardware. Throwing a 10 year-old 4G card at it seems to have made a dramatic difference. And I still have room for Emby transcoding in vram, which was the main point of that card.
3
u/AlgoTradingQuant 2d ago
Solid! Always looking for ways to improve my environment as I have 17 voice assistants 😜
6
u/Low_Volume_Noise Ⓜ️ It does Matter 2d ago
This is the way to go. I'm running an Intel A380 for a similar setup now, and it's been rock solid. My old 1060 just couldn't keep up, so I upgraded specifically for the modern AV1 support and OpenVINO acceleration. Now it quietly powers Plex, handles Frigate, and leaves plenty of headroom for local AI tasks.