Hey everyone! I wanted to share my journey with setting up a custom wake word for my home automation system. It’s been quite an adventure, and I’m excited to see if anyone else has tackled something similar or can offer some insights.
So, here’s the deal: I’ve been using the Voice Assistant for a few weeks now, and it’s been fantastic. It understands and speaks European Portuguese, which is a big plus compared to Alexa or Google Assistant. I’ve managed to tweak it to my liking, but there’s one thing that’s been bugging me—wake words. The pre-determined ones like ‘OK Nabu’ work fairly well, but I want something more personal and fun.
Enter ‘Ambrósio.’ It’s an unusual name, but everyone knows it from the Portuguese version of a 90s Ferrero Rocher ad. Plus, it’s four syllables and doesn’t sound like any common Portuguese word. Perfect, right? I thought so too!
I decided to train a custom wake word model using Google Colab. I tried approximating the phonetics in English, but it only worked about 50-60% of the time. Not great, but a start. Then, I discovered Porcupine and its wake word detection capabilities. I trained a new model in Portuguese, but uploading it to Home Assistant has been a hurdle. I’m using both a Raspberry Pi 3 with a ReSpeaker 2-mic HAT and a M5Stack Atom for hardware, so I’m not sure if that’s complicating things.
Has anyone successfully set up a custom wake word in Portuguese using Porcupine in Home Assistant? If not, are there alternative solutions? I’m really set on making ‘Ambrósio’ work. Any tips or workarounds would be invaluable!
Thanks in advance for your help and for being such an amazing community! 