A pre-release for field validation. HACS offers this only to users who have enabled beta versions for this repository. It is not a public release, and the changes below still ship to everyone in the next monthly bundle as 3.43.0.
It's cut so @andymcmanus can measure the #671 follow-ups on his Voice PE + Kokoro + qwen3 setup. It supersedes v3.43.0-beta.6.
What changed since beta.6
The first sentence of a streamed reply reaches the satellite at once (#688). Home Assistant converts streamed speech for the satellite with ffmpeg, and that step passes nothing on until it has received 64 KB of audio. HGA streamed mp3, at about 8 KB per second of speech, so a short first sentence ("Let me check.") was held until about 8 seconds of speech had piled up. That's why it came out bundled with the answer. HGA now streams WAV and pads the first sentence with a moment of silence past that threshold. On a Voice PE, the first audio arrived 0.18 s after the acknowledgement; before, it took 15 s, and the satellite gave up after 2 s. In a follow-up turn, giving up aborted the reply and could leave the satellite logging "Announcement source error" until it was restarted.
The acknowledgement can be spoken as soon as the agent starts (#686). This is @andymcmanus's suggestion. A new option, When to speak the acknowledgement, sits under Spoken acknowledgement (voice only) (renamed from …before tool use):
- As soon as the agent starts (the default) is heard about a second after the request reaches the agent, ahead of the model's prefill. It's also said before replies that need no tools, so neutral wording such as
One moment.suits it. - Before the first tool call keeps the beta.5 behaviour.
"Yes" to an offer gets the tools to act on it (#687). "Want me to turn it off?" followed by "Yes" used to search for tools using "Yes" alone, find none that could act, and end with "I wasn't able to complete this request after several tool-use attempts". A short acceptance is now searched together with the agent's offer.
What to validate
- With the acknowledgement set and As soon as the agent starts: a "why" question. The phrase should come about 1 s after you stop talking, then the answer.
- A follow-up "Yes" to an offer (without the wake word) should act on it, and the satellite should return to idle with no error loop.
- Timings as before (question end → first audio → answer audio), compared with beta.6.
Everything from beta.6 (the local-intent history fix), beta.5 (streaming TTS) and beta.4 (Ring event recordings) is included. See CHANGELOG.md under Unreleased.