What's new in Kiosk Satellite 2026.8.33
One feature, and a big one under the hood: voice turns now run their transport natively, so speech recognition no longer competes with the dashboard for the browser's main thread.
New: Native voice pipeline
- Until now the app streamed every microphone chunk into the dashboard page during a voice turn, where Voice Satellite decoded it and re-sent it to Home Assistant over the page's own connection. On weak tablets that round trip rides the same main thread that renders the dashboard and the assistant overlay, so speech delivery stuttered exactly when the page was busiest.
- The app now subscribes the assist pipeline run on its own authenticated websocket and uploads the microphone audio directly, so during a voice turn no audio touches the page at all, in either direction. Speech delivery is paced by the app, immune to page jank, and speech recognition stays steady however busy the dashboard is.
- Everything behaves exactly as before: the overlay, wake and done chimes, the cross-tablet dedupe window, seamless one-shot commands, continue conversation, and server-initiated interactions like
ask_questionandstart_conversationall take the native path with the same choreography. The reactive bar animates to speech levels the app computes with the same speech weighting Voice Satellite applies to raw audio. - Like the wake word handoff, this negotiates itself and there is nothing to configure: Voice Satellite 2026.8.7 uses it, an older Voice Satellite keeps working exactly as before, and if the app cannot take a turn for any reason (Home Assistant restarting, network drop, the engine mid-recovery) the turn falls back to the page path on its own and delegation resumes by itself once things are healthy again.
- A read-only Native voice pipeline row in the Wake word group, in the device settings and the remote admin alike, shows Supported or Not supported so it is easy to tell whether the installed Voice Satellite version takes advantage of it.
Pairs with Voice Satellite 2026.8.7; with an older Voice Satellite this release changes nothing about voice behavior.