Thank you, I will look into piping the audio, but its unlikely I will get very far :)

Question: is it possible to run terminal commands at the different stages of MMM-AssistantMk2, such as running a command to turn on a GPIO pin (using the built in ‘GPIO write X 1’ ) when the module begins listening, and turning it off again when it is understanding, or speaking perhaps? the use case for which would be a status LED on the mirror. Thanks again.

@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

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!

@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?

This is fantastic thank you, I have got everything set up, it hears and responds (on screen) to every request - but unfortunately I get no sound (no speaking feedback), when a youtube video plays, the sound works fine, do I need to change the output device somewhere? I’m struggling to find the config for it.