Linux Voice Assistant shortens its wake-sound delay

Linux Voice Assistant uses the PulseAudio output by default rather than letting its audio player choose a driver. On a tested Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, that reduces the wait for a wake sound after the assistant has been quiet for a long time.

In Florian Asche’s tests, the measured interval from opening the wake-sound file to finishing it was about 2.3–2.4 seconds with the previous automatic output after five or thirteen hours of silence, compared with 0.87 seconds on PulseAudio after about nineteen hours. The few runs used a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, Satellite1 HAT, Docker and PipeWire’s PulseAudio compatibility service; they do not establish the same improvement on other hardware.

Explicit device choices stay unchanged. The new default requires a reachable PulseAudio service, including PipeWire’s compatible service, and does not fall back to another audio driver if it is missing.