People keep asking me when I’ll write the next instalment of my local voice assistant journey. I didn’t mean for it to be so long since the last one, things have been busier than I’d like. Anyway. Last time we’d built Tensorflow, so now it’s time to sort out openWakeWord. As a reminder we’re trying to put a local voice satellite on my living room Debian media machine.

The point of openWakeWord is to run on the machine the microphone is connected to, listening for the wake phrase (“Hey Jarvis” in my case), and only then calling back to the central server to do a speech to text operation. It’s wrapped up for Wyoming as wyoming-openwakeword.

Of course I’ve packaged it up - available at https://salsa.debian.org/noodles/wyoming-openwakeword. Trixie only released yesterday, so I’m still running all of this on bookworm. That means you need python3-wyoming from Trixie - 1.6.0-1 will install fine without needing rebuilt - and the python3-tflite-runtime we built last time.

Like the other pieces I’m not sure about how this could land in Debian; it’s unclear to me that the pre-trained models provided would be accepted in main.

As usual I start it with with a systemd unit file dropped in /etc/systemd/service/wyoming-openwakeword.service:

[Unit]
Description=Wyoming OpenWakeWord server
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
DynamicUser=yes
ExecStart=/usr/bin/wyoming-openwakeword --uri tcp://[::1]:10400/ --preload-model 'hey_jarvis' --threshold 0.8

MemoryDenyWriteExecute=false
ProtectControlGroups=true
PrivateDevices=false
ProtectKernelTunables=true
ProtectSystem=true
RestrictRealtime=true
RestrictNamespaces=true

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

I’m still playing with the threshold level. It defaults to 0.5, but the device lives under the TV and seems to get a bit confused by it sometimes. There’s some talk about using speex for noise suppression, but I haven’t explored that yet (it’s yet another Python module to bind to the C libraries I’d have to look at).

This is a short one; next post is actually building the local satellite on top to tie everything together.