MMM-AssistantMk2

jomwells

@sean Yes, the pm2 error logs show some alsa related errors, I assume this is why the assistant doesn’t produce audio?

/home/pi/.pm2/logs/MagicMirror-error.log:

[../deps/mpg123/src/output/alsa.c:90] error: initialize_device(): cannot set format S16_LE
MESA-LOADER: failed to retrieve device information
libGL error: MESA-LOADER: failed to retrieve device information
[../deps/mpg123/src/output/alsa.c:94] error: initialize_device(): cannot set 1 channels

I have a pretty fresh install of MagicMirror so shouldn’t be an issue of too many modules, im using an RPI3, and a USB sound card, thanks
on a side note, to get the Hotword and Assistant module to choose the correct microphone, I have had to change the input device to

device: 'plughw:1',

however each time I reboot, the input devices change order and I need to edit the config file again, is there a way to stop them changing device number?

A Former User

@jomwells
Frankly says, I’m not an expert of system administration. Especially Alsa configuration is out of my ability.
Anyway you should success this test.

arecord -d 10 test.wav & aplay test.wav

It should record your voice and play again.

It means, your mic and speaker should be default device.

jomwells

To anyone having issues with RPI3 and a USB sound card, the solution to this was to change ‘/home/pi/.asoundrc’ to:

pcm.!default {
  type plug
  slave {
    pcm "hw:1,0"
  }
}

ctl.!default {
    type hw
    card 1
}

(where the USB device is card 1)
Thank you @Sean for your help, it is now working brilliantly, this is by far the best voice assistant module for MM!
Is there any way to configure how long the result card displays on screen before hiding itself? If not, could this be added in a later version? thanks!

A Former User

@jomwells
Card display time is decided by card itself. Maybe I can hook the duration, but with some painful effort, not even clearly.
The card itself is hardcoded, so there isn’t enough margin to manipulate. Originally the card would be planned to be used on specific device - smart tv, so ours has some limitation for full usage.
For example, In smart tv, a user can decide to play or not the result of a YouTube search by remote controller, but we haven’t. That is why I implement YouTube player in this module. Other functions are the same.

jomwells

@sean Ah I see, its not essential at all! one minor bug I seem to have, that I have noticed does not occur for you in your demonstration video is that now, having finished the audio reply, there is often a very short sound, it sounds like the last half a second of text is repeated, sometimes it is more of a ‘buzz’, I attempted changing the encodingOut setting to one of the other options (MP3 or OPUS_IN_OGG) but both of these just give white noise (like an old tv with no signal) in place of any audio, is this something you have come across at all, and is there anything you can suggest to fix it? maybe getting the alternative encoding to work? thanks

A Former User

@jomwells
I’m not sure.
Voice output is just buffered stream, so just piping it to the speaker is all of mechanism. So at the moment I have no idea why last data is duplicated(?) in your environment.
Voice output stream comes chunked, so there is some possibility of the time gap between incoming stream chunks.

Maybe instead piping Linear16 to speaker directly, writing response stream to mp3(or ogg) file then playing that file could be one of solutions.(sorry, I didn’t implement that)

A Former User

@jomwells
For the Speaker, research this.
https://github.com/TooTallNate/node-speaker

Sun

@jomwells Mine is a little bit different as I use the hdmi on tv as speaker as well. the default device fall on card 0 with alsa. For microphone is usb on card 1. I don’t have problem with microphone but I did have problem with sound via hdmi. Sometime sound just come out right through the hdmi but with lag sound, sometime no sound at all and say device busy. Also, to avoid hdmi device busy, I use usb sound card instead of hdmi sound also very lag.

pcm.!default {
type asym
playback.pcm
{
type hw
card 0
device 1
}
capture.pcm
{
type hw
card 1
device 0
}
}

Sun

@sean How to change the piping Linear 16 to ogg. Can I just put ogg in the

encodingOut: “OPUS_IN_OGG”,

A Former User

@sun
No, mp3 and Ogg should be written to file or piping to proper player, frankly I didn’t implement those function, because I thought nobody needs.
I’ll try those till next update.