Upgrades: wake word, push-to-talk, LEDs¶

whispa-pi ships with voice-activated recording (sox VAD) or fixed-length recording (arecord). Here are common upgrades, all optional and offline-friendly.

Wake word ("Hey Pi")¶

Add an always-listening wake word so you don't rely on silence detection:

openWakeWord — open, offline, custom words.
Porcupine — very accurate (free tier needs a key).

Pattern: run the wake-word detector in a small always-on process; when it fires, call appliance.runOnce(). Because the Appliance exposes runOnce(), you can drive it from any trigger.

Push-to-talk button (GPIO)¶

Wire a momentary button to a GPIO pin and trigger a turn on press:

import { Appliance, ArecordRecorder, AplayPlayer } from 'whispa-pi';
// e.g. with onoff or @raspberrypi/gpio
button.on('press', () => appliance.runOnce());

Use ArecordRecorder (fixed seconds) or start/stop recording on press/release.

Status LEDs¶

Give feedback with an LED (or a ReSpeaker's ring): idle → listening → thinking → speaking. Hook into the appliance lifecycle:

new Appliance({
  recorder, pipeline, player,
  onTurn: () => led.idle(),
});
// set led.listening() before record, led.thinking() before turn, etc. by
// composing your own runOnce, or extend Appliance.

Tools & smart-home actions¶

Since the "brain" is your LlmEngine, you can add tool-calling inside it (timers, lights, HTTP calls) without changing the audio loop. Keep actions local to stay offline.

Better voices / languages¶

Piper has many voices and languages — swap piperModel for a different .onnx. For non-English, also pick a matching whisper model (multilingual base/small).