Voice Satellite

The full-stack OVOS voice satellite. Microphone, VAD, wakeword, STT, and TTS all run on this device. Only the transcribed text utterance is sent to the hub. Responses arrive as text and are spoken locally.

What runs locally: Microphone + VAD + Wakeword + STT + TTS

What the hub provides: Skills, intents, reasoning

When to use it

• Devices with sufficient CPU/GPU (laptop, desktop, Raspberry Pi 4B or better)
• Maximum audio privacy — audio never leaves the device
• Low-latency interaction (no round-trip for audio)
• Offline operation after initial model downloads

Install

pip install HiveMind-voice-sat

# Linux (ALSA / SoundDevice microphone support)
pip install HiveMind-voice-sat[linux]

# macOS
pip install HiveMind-voice-sat[mac]

Quickstart

1. On the hub — register a client:

hivemind-core add-client --name my-voice-sat

2. On the satellite — run it:

hivemind-voice-sat --host <hub_host> --key <access_key> --password <password>

Say your wakeword. The satellite transcribes locally and sends the utterance text to the hub.

CLI reference

Usage: hivemind-voice-sat [OPTIONS]

Options:
  --host TEXT      HiveMind host (ws:// or wss://)
  --key TEXT       Access key
  --password TEXT  Password for key derivation
  --port INTEGER   HiveMind port number (default: 5678)
  --selfsigned     Accept self-signed TLS certificates
  --siteid TEXT    Location identifier for message context

All flags fall back to the identity file written by hivemind-client set-identity.

Configuration

voice-sat reads ~/.config/mycroft/mycroft.conf (standard OVOS configuration). Override STT, TTS, VAD, and wakeword plugins there.

Example:

{
  "listener": {
    "VAD": {
      "module": "ovos-vad-plugin-silero"
    },
    "wake_word": "hey_mycroft",
    "hey_mycroft": {
      "module": "ovos-ww-plugin-vosk"
    }
  },
  "stt": {
    "module": "ovos-stt-plugin-server",
    "ovos-stt-plugin-server": { "url": "https://stt.openvoiceos.org/stt" }
  },
  "tts": {
    "module": "ovos-tts-plugin-server",
    "ovos-tts-plugin-server": { "host": "https://tts.openvoiceos.org" }
  }
}

All plugin slots are swappable via ovos-plugin-manager.

Plugin type	Config key	Required
Microphone	listener.microphone.module	Yes
VAD	listener.VAD.module	Yes
Wakeword	listener.wake_word	Yes (can skip with continuous listening)
STT	stt.module	Yes
TTS	tts.module	Yes
G2P	g2p.module	No
Media playback	various	No
Audio/Dialog transformers	various	No
PHAL	PHAL.ovos-phal-...	No

How it differs from other satellites

Unlike mic-satellite and voice-relay, voice-sat sends text utterances to the hub — no audio leaves the device. The hub only needs to run skills and return text responses. It does not need hivemind-audio-binary-protocol.

You also choose your own STT and TTS plugins, independent of any hub configuration.