I have the Respeaker 4 mic array (real name is Respeaker mic array v2.0) and it is pretty good.
The AEC and beam forming claerly do the job and I can get the wakeword detected (the one from Snips though) from more than 5 meters away while playing music near the mic array.
Note that the Respeaker Mic Array v2 firmware limits the audio playback quality to 16Khz (their 48Khz firmware is pretty bad due to XMOS capacity limitations and the AEC is inexistant).
I’ve heard good things regarding the sensitivity of the Respeaker 2 mic hat but it does not provides AEC or any audio algorithms. For AEC you’ll have to implement it yourself using something like Pulseaudio.
If you plan to play music via your assistant, the Respeaker mic array v2 is a very good device.
If not, I think the 2 mic hat should be pretty good.
have you the MicArray usb version? I’m confusing about the names
I tried snowboy and I can definitively say that with respeaker 2 it’s much more precise than porcupine.
I suggest it with the same hardware.
Thanks you
Does Respeaker Mic Array v2.0 (USB) work out of the box on raspbian or does it need driver installation?
I bought one I will receive it in the next days
Sorry to resurrect this thread, but I’m trying to get the same setup (snips-satellite (I like snips’ hotword detection) and rhasspy handling the rest (I dislike the rest of modern-day snips)).
Do you run the snips part on the same raspy as the rhasspy software? I’m using the ps3 eye mic and run into “arecord: main:828: audio open error: Device or resource busy” errors when I have snips-satellite running.
Hey, do you have to use it as an output device in order for the AEC and the rest of its magic to work? Can I use for output, for instance, a regular lineout from the board?
The AEC needs the audio ouput to remove it from the input signal.
Sending the playback to 2 outputs at the same time is quite problematic due to clock synchronisation and latency issue between audio devices (I’m not savy enough to get past that).
So, If one send the output through Raspberry’s line out device, Respeaker won’t be able to work or will perform like it doesn’t have AEC enabled, right?
The Respeaker Mic Array v2 outputs stereo in 16Khz 16bits. You can ear the difference between 16Khz and 48Khz when playing music through earphones. The sound is like muffled. To me, It is not obvious when playing through loudspeakers. For a vocal assistant that can play radio stream and Spotify it’ll do for me. I prefer a lesser audio quality but a great voice interactivity.
I tried Seeed’s 48Khz firmware that improves the playback quality (with strange « shhh » sounds that are not acceptable though) and the AEC is almost non existant. I notified them on their forum and their response was that the XMos chip is not capable of processing AEC at this sample rate.
If I have enough time, I’ll give PulseAudio AEC module another go because I’d really like to not be dependent on a specific Mic in the future.
Is it an option to output the audio both to the respeaker and your normal speakers, so the XMos Chip can do it’s processing at 16kHz, while you listen to it with a higher sample rate?
Hm ok. Yeah at least for me that makes the respeaker pretty useless, since there is no way I will listen to all my music with 16kHz for the AEC. Especially since the respeaker has quite some latency with all the preprocessing and USB communication already
I guess I will give Pulseaudio AEC with a faster mic using I2S a try when I find the time aswell then.
I will try it out when I have some time. When it works well I can absolutely create python bindings using the Python C Api so we can integrate it better into rhasspy.
