Keen for this also. Been having issues getting a smooth voice experience from HA to ChatGPT. I dont like the whole wakeword concept for the receiver either. I think theres work to be done on the whole stack.
Great timing as I was looking into it yesterday as was thinking about writing my own set of agents to run house stuff. I don't want to spent loads of time on voice interaction so HA wakeword stuff would've been useful. If not I'll bypass HA for voice and really only use HA via mcp.
I can do fw dev for micros...but omg do I not want to spend the time looking thru a datasheet and getting something to run efficiently myself these days.
However-> These are device specific. The devices I purchased for this purpose have very few vendor supported wakewords, but even more prominently, refuse to integrate with HA. Possible firmware issue, but I have reloaded the firmware 30 times. I dont necessarily want to purchase something else for this purpose. Which is where building a bespoke HA audio box becomes its own can of worms.
But if you want a custom wake word, or more like a wake phrase, you go down a rabbit hole of training/cost/memory etc that starts to get annoying fast.
I kind of know I am being unreasonable. I dont want a device that just ships off everything it hears to an LLM, even local, that would suck. I just want a third way.
Then theres other stuff. Like HA has a hard time with providing context to an LLM, because it sends the whole conversation thus far off to the LLM for context. It can get really weird really quickly. This caused me a lot of issues with lights for example. It would remember switching a light on, and if that was in the context, would refuse to switch it on a second time if it turned off due to a rule or manual intervention. But if you dont send the context, you cant have deeper conversations. You cant ask subsequent questions basically.
It's not really a big burden.
A tiny AI running locally is the third option you want. That's the only reasonable way to do configurable wake word detection
But even thats a bit of a wild tradeoff.
"Hey, are you still having trouble with[succinct summary of a problem it identified]?" "Yes" "I have a solution that meets your requirements as I understand them, and fits in your budget."
I call that Dreaming.
(TM)
Doubly so if you could just talk and brainstorm while it's listening and condensing, so you can circle back later and see what raindrops formed from the brainstorm.
Call that DayDreaming (TM)
Reminds me of a video from the 90's where some wizard put a camcorder and a giant antenna on a petrol powered rc car, an even bigger antenna on his house and controlled it from a 40's style sofa and a huge tube TV in his cramped garage. Over a mile range. Surrounded by enormous cars I think he was going 40-50 mph but with the screaming engine sound and the camera so low to the ground it looked like 500 mph. I'm still laughing, it looked like he was having all of the fun.