What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.11.12
This release makes taps on overlays drawn over the screensaver leave it up and adds a setting that brightens the screensaver after those taps. It also adds a ring volume for the intercom, moves Amazon's wake word engine users to vsWakeWord and fixes wake word arbitration after a boot without Wi-Fi.
Improvements
- Brighten for touch interactions. Settings > Screensaver > Brighten for touch interactions restores the brightness from before the screensaver for 5 seconds after a touch that leaves the screensaver up, such as a tap on a notification, the Voice Satellite bubble or a plugin card. Each touch starts the countdown again. It can be set from 1 to 15 seconds, or 0 to turn it off, and shows when Screensaver brightness is on.
- Ring volume for the intercom. Settings > Intercom > Answer > Ring volume sets how loud a call rings, both the built-in ring and a picked ring sound, separately from the media volume. The ring used to play at the notification volume, so an updated kiosk starts at that level. Each kiosk keeps its own ring volume, so new fleet profiles leave it out.
- Talk right after the wake word only applies to Assist pipelines. With it on, a realtime conversation skipped the wake sound and sent what was said right after the wake word, which could include the end of the wake word ("So, what time is it?"). Realtime conversations now always start after the wake sound when Play chimes is on.
Fixes
- A tap on an overlay over the screensaver no longer wakes it (#1340). Taps on a plugin overlay drawn over the screensaver, such as the Live Activities cards and their buttons, dismissed the screensaver and the overlay along with it. The same happened with the docked Voice Satellite bubble, including a double tap to end the conversation, a full screen voice overlay, notification cards, the intercom call card and announcements. A tap on any of these now goes to the overlay and the screensaver stays up. A tap anywhere else still dismisses it.
- Wake word arbitration after a boot without Wi-Fi. If Kiosk Satellite started before Wi-Fi had an address, as an Echo Dot can after a reboot, the first arbitration message failed and closed UDP port 2330 until the app restarted. The kiosk still answered its wake word, but if it and another kiosk both heard it, both could answer. The port now opens again 5 seconds after it closes and the other kiosks receive this kiosk's messages again.
- Crash loop when an old camera keeps failing to open. On Android 11 and older, a camera that runs through Android's HAL1 compatibility layer, such as on Echo Shows with Android 7.1, leaves two threads running after every failed open until the app restarts. A camera that kept failing ran the app out of threads in under an hour and the crash came back after every restart. The app now restarts at 400 leaked camera threads, well before that point, and brings the kiosk back to the front. On these devices CameraX also retries a failed open for 2 seconds instead of 10. The crash log records the restart as a camera watchdog restart.
- No reply to the echo of a realtime answer. Right after an answer stopped playing, its echo could still reach the microphone. An OpenAI conversation could mistake that echo for the user and reply, often with something nobody asked for. Speech that starts in that moment now has to be as loud as talking over an answer. xAI and Gemini conversations already worked this way. The app log now shows where each stretch of speech starts and stops relative to the end of the last answer, and when the provider heard no words.
- Calendar editing settings in the app's language. Settings > Calendar > Allow adding and editing events and Allow deleting events showed their labels and hints in English in every language, on the kiosk and in the remote admin.
Changes
- Amazon's wake word engine is no longer offered. The Amazon option is gone from Wake word engine on the Echo Dot, Echo Show 5 and Echo Show 8 images, along with the Wake word language setting. A kiosk that used it moves to vsWakeWord with the Alexa wake word on its first start after the update, and the selects in Home Assistant update to match.