Listen on the Scarlett, because the fifine returns silence (V-487)

mavwaked has logged zero completed utterances in three days of journal, and
the wake word is not why: the count was zero before it existed too. The fifine
returns RMS 0.00004 over five seconds with its capture switch on and its ALSA
volume at the full 496 of 496, so the silence is in the hardware and no flag
reaches it.

Measured over eight seconds of the same speech: fifine 0.00004, onboard ALC897
0.142 clipping at peak 1.0, USB camera 0.289 clipping, Scarlett Solo 0.003
clean. The two loud ones clip, so the quiet clean one wins.

Named CARD=Gen rather than card 4, because a USB card number moves when
something else is replugged and this daemon must not change ears quietly.

Verified in the room: keyword heard at score 0.999, utterance complete in
1.65s, and she answered "сейчас 17 часов 24 минуты".

cmd/mavwaked/wakefeatures.go

@@ -71,15 +71,30 @@ func newWakeModels(melPath, embedPath, headPath, libPath string) (*wakeModels, e
 			return nil, fmt.Errorf("wake word: onnx runtime: %w", err)
 		}
 	}
+	// One thread per session, not the default of every core. Measured on
+	// workpc: the default took mavwaked from 68% of one core to 335% of
+	// three, for three graphs that each run in well under 80ms single
+	// threaded. An always-on gate that eats a quarter of the workstation is
+	// not a gate he will leave running.
+	opts, err := ort.NewSessionOptions()
+	if err != nil {
+		return nil, fmt.Errorf("wake word: session options: %w", err)
+	}
+	defer opts.Destroy()
+	if err := opts.SetIntraOpNumThreads(1); err != nil {
+		return nil, fmt.Errorf("wake word: intra-op threads: %w", err)
+	}
+	if err := opts.SetInterOpNumThreads(1); err != nil {
+		return nil, fmt.Errorf("wake word: inter-op threads: %w", err)
+	}
 	open := func(p string, in, out []string) (*ort.DynamicAdvancedSession, error) {
-		s, err := ort.NewDynamicAdvancedSession(p, in, out, nil)
+		s, err := ort.NewDynamicAdvancedSession(p, in, out, opts)
 		if err != nil {
 			return nil, fmt.Errorf("wake word: load %s: %w", p, err)
 		}
 		return s, nil
 	}
 	m := &wakeModels{}
-	var err error
 	if m.mel, err = open(melPath, []string{"input"}, []string{"output"}); err != nil {
 		return nil, err
 	}

cmd/mavwaked/wakeword.go

@@ -21,11 +21,15 @@ import (
 	"sync"
 )
 
-// defaultWakeThreshold — score above which the keyword was said. Picked from
-// the false-accept rate on held-out Russian speech, not from accuracy: a miss
-// costs him a repeat, a false accept costs a turn nobody asked for. See
-// docs/evals for the wakes-per-hour this buys.
-const defaultWakeThreshold = 0.99
+// defaultWakeThreshold — score above which the keyword was said.
+//
+// Picked from the false-accept rate on held-out Russian speech, not from
+// accuracy: a miss costs him a repeat, a false accept costs a turn nobody
+// asked for. Over 65 minutes of Common Voice, 0.99 woke her three times and
+// 0.999 once, and the difference in recall was one render out of 126. So the
+// default is the strict one. `docs/evals/2026-08-09-wake-word.md` has both
+// tables.
+const defaultWakeThreshold = 0.999
 
 // wakeWord is the streaming state around wakeModels. It is fed the same
 // capture frames the VAD sees and answers whether the keyword has just been

deploy/mavwaked.service

@@ -4,11 +4,22 @@
 # user unit because it needs his ALSA session and his ssh agent, and because
 # it should stop when he logs out.
 #
-# THERE IS NO WAKE WORD YET (V-487 stage two). Anything spoken near the fifine
-# becomes a turn. What makes that safe rather than expensive is voiceSender:
-# it sends Surface=SurfaceVoice, which caps every command at L0, so no
-# accidental trigger runs a destructive act. It does not stop her answering
-# out loud, so this unit is his to stop when the room is not his alone.
+# The keyword is "Мэйвен" and the three -wake- flags are what require it
+# (V-487 stage two). Without them anything spoken near the fifine becomes a
+# turn, which voiceSender makes safe rather than expensive: it sends
+# Surface=SurfaceVoice, capping every command at L0. That does not stop her
+# answering out loud, which is the whole reason the keyword exists.
+#
+# The threshold is 0.999 and it is the binary's default, so it is not passed.
+# It came from 65 minutes of held-out Russian speech through this same binary:
+# 0.9 false wakes an hour against 2.8 at 0.99, for one lost render out of 126
+# (docs/evals/2026-08-09-wake-word.md). If the room proves noisier than the
+# corpus, read the scores out of this unit's journal and pass -wake-threshold.
+# Do not lower it by guessing.
+#
+# A keyword shorter than 1.32s can be heard too late to be used, because the
+# head scores 1.28s of audio and the VAD has closed the utterance by then.
+# "Мэйвен, <request>" is unaffected. A bare "Мэйвен" is the case that fails.
 #
 # -vad-model is passed on purpose. Silero answers "is this frame speech" where
 # the energy floor answers "is this frame loud". It declines white noise at
@@ -24,27 +35,39 @@
 #            systemctl --user enable --now mavwaked.service
 
 [Unit]
-Description=Maven always-on listening (VAD, no wake word yet)
+Description=Maven always-on listening (silero VAD, "Мэйвен" keyword)
 # The tunnel is the only path to mavend and the only thing authenticating it.
 Requires=maven-voice-tunnel.service
 After=maven-voice-tunnel.service
 
 [Service]
-# card 0 is the fifine USB microphone. Named, and not "default", because the
-# default device follows whatever pipewire last decided and this daemon should
-# not change ears when he plugs in a headset.
+# The Scarlett Solo 4th Gen, and not the fifine. The fifine was the device
+# here for three days and mavwaked never logged one utterance in them, because
+# it returns RMS 0.00004 with its capture switch on and its ALSA volume at the
+# full 496 of 496. That silence is in the hardware, so no flag reaches it.
+#
+# Named CARD=Gen and not card 4, because a USB card number moves when
+# something else is replugged and this daemon must not change ears quietly.
+# Not "default" either: that follows whatever pipewire last decided.
 #
 # plughw and not hw. mavwaked asks arecord for 16kHz mono, which is what the
-# whole pipeline is canonical in. The fifine offers 2 channels at 44100 or
-# 48000 and nothing else, so bare hw:0,0 dies on "Channels count non
-# available" before a frame is read. plughw puts ALSA's downmix and resampler
-# in front. Any replacement microphone wants the same treatment.
+# whole pipeline is canonical in. Neither microphone offers it, so bare hw
+# dies on "Channels count non available" before a frame is read. plughw puts
+# ALSA's downmix and resampler in front. Any replacement wants the same.
+#
+# The Scarlett measured RMS 0.003 against 0.14 on the onboard input, so its
+# front-panel gain is the thing to raise if she mishears. That is a knob, not
+# a control ALSA exposes. The two loud devices, the onboard ALC897 and the
+# camera, both clip at peak 1.0 and are worse candidates, not better ones.
 Environment=LD_LIBRARY_PATH=%h/.local/lib
 ExecStart=%h/.local/bin/mavwaked \
-  -device plughw:0,0 \
+  -device plughw:CARD=Gen,DEV=0 \
   -addr 127.0.0.1:9100 \
   -lang ru \
   -vad-model %h/.local/share/maven/models/silero_vad.onnx \
+  -wake-model %h/.local/share/maven/models/maven_wakeword.onnx \
+  -wake-mel %h/.local/share/maven/models/melspectrogram.onnx \
+  -wake-embed %h/.local/share/maven/models/embedding_model.onnx \
   -onnx-lib %h/.local/lib/libonnxruntime.so
 Restart=on-failure
 RestartSec=5

docs/deployment.md

@@ -170,7 +170,19 @@ The device is `plughw:0,0` and not `hw:0,0`. The fifine offers 2 channels at
 44100 or 48000 and nothing else, and mavwaked asks arecord for 16kHz mono. Bare
 `hw` dies on "Channels count non available" before a frame is read.
 
-There is no wake word yet (V-487 stage two), so the loop runs open.
+The three `-wake-` flags require the keyword "Мэйвен" (V-487 stage two). Drop
+them and the loop runs open, which is what it did before. The threshold is the
+binary's default of 0.999 and is not passed. Over 65 minutes of held-out
+Russian speech it woke her 0.9 times an hour against 2.8 at 0.99. That cost one
+lost render out of 126 (`docs/evals/2026-08-09-wake-word.md`).
+
+The three sessions are pinned to one thread each. onnxruntime otherwise sizes
+its pool to every core and spins between runs, which took mavwaked from 68% of
+one core to 335%. With the cap it sits at 81%, so the gate costs about 13%.
+
+A keyword shorter than 1.32s can be heard too late to be used. The head scores
+1.28s of audio, and the VAD has closed the utterance by then.
+"Мэйвен, <request>" is unaffected. A bare "Мэйвен" is the case that fails.
 
 mavwaked connects at startup and holds the conn, so a nudge routed to voice
 reaches the speaker before he has said anything (V-671). It used to connect

docs/evals/2026-08-09-wake-word.md

@@ -0,0 +1,112 @@
+# The "Мэйвен" wake word: what it hears and what it invents
+
+*Measured 2026-08-09 on workpc and homesrv. V-487, stage two of two.*
+
+Stage one gave mavwaked silero-vad, which answers "is this frame speech".
+Nothing answered "was this said to her", so every utterance near the
+microphone became a turn. SurfaceVoice caps acts at L0, which made that safe
+rather than expensive. L0 does not cap reading, so the room could still hear
+his facts read back.
+
+The keyword is "Мэйвен". openWakeWord's two frozen feature models do the
+hearing and a 100KB head trained here draws the boundary. It runs on CPU
+beside silero and never touches the GPU.
+
+## Why a per-window accuracy is not a number anyone can act on
+
+The gate scores every 80ms. A 1.7% false-accept rate per window sounds small
+and means a wake every few seconds. The useful question is how many times an hour
+it wakes on speech that was not the keyword. So every table below counts
+threshold crossings over whole clips and divides by the audio duration.
+
+A crossing, not a window above the threshold. A keyword held high for half a
+second is one wake, not six.
+
+## The data
+
+Positives are 600 silero TTS renders of three stressings of the keyword, six
+speakers, ten trailing phrases, augmented eight ways each. Hard negatives are
+560 renders of confusable Russian words. Real speech is Common Voice ru and Golos.
+The 74257 Common Voice clips were already on workpc from the CrisperWhisper
+work. The 200 Golos clips came from the CW2 WER eval.
+
+Splits are by source file. Augmented copies of one render on both sides of a
+split would measure memorisation.
+
+Golos was never trained on at any stage, so it answers the harder question:
+does this survive a change of speakers and rooms.
+
+## Three heads
+
+Each row is a full retrain. The false-accept column is 8.89 hours of Common
+Voice that no stage of training had seen.
+
+| trained on | recall (window) | false wakes/hour @0.99 |
+|---|---|---|
+| TTS + 13.7 min of Golos | 0.869 | not measurable |
+| + 4000 Common Voice clips | 0.836 | 21.9 |
+| + 3837 mined hard negatives | 0.784 | 4.2 |
+| + 753 more mined | 0.810 | 3.4 |
+
+The first row is why the second exists. Thirteen minutes of held-out speech
+cannot measure a rate for a gate that scores twelve times a second. A head
+trained only against TTS learns to tell TTS from not-TTS.
+
+Mining is the whole story after that. Random negatives teach the head what
+most speech sounds like. They do not teach it the few syllable sequences that
+score high, because 4000 clips barely contain them. So the current head was
+run over 20000 fresh clips, keeping every window it scored above 0.05. That
+found 3837 windows in 855512. Repeating those ten times in the next training
+run cut the rate five-fold.
+
+The second round found 753 in 852240, a fifth of the yield, and bought a
+further 20%. It also recovered recall, which the first round had cost. Whether
+a third round is worth 25 minutes of workpc is untested.
+
+## Where the threshold came from
+
+Both columns are held out. Positives are the 126 renders in the test split.
+Speech is 65.1 minutes of Common Voice, disjoint from every training and
+mining pool. Both were run through the built `mavwaked` binary reading PCM from a
+file, not through the python that trained the head.
+
+| threshold | renders shipped | false wakes/hour |
+|---|---|---|
+| 0.99 | 116 / 126 | 2.8 |
+| 0.999 | 115 / 126 | 0.9 |
+
+One render against a third of the false wakes. `defaultWakeThreshold` is
+0.999.
+
+Golos disagrees. It gave 2 wakes in 14 minutes at every threshold, which is
+8.7 per hour. Two events is not a rate. What it does say is that a handful of real utterances score above 0.999
+and no threshold will move them.
+
+## What it costs him
+
+Ten of the 126 held-out renders were heard and still dropped, and every one
+was an utterance shorter than 1.32s. The head scores 16 embeddings, or 1.28s of
+audio. The score therefore peaks up to a second after a short keyword ends.
+By then the VAD has closed the utterance and dispatch has already asked.
+
+Real commands are "Мэйвен, <request>" and run past two seconds, which gives
+the head the whole request to peak during. A bare "Мэйвен" with nothing after
+it is the case that fails. One fix would hold an ignored utterance for a grace
+period and ship it if the keyword lands late. It is not built.
+
+## What it costs the workstation
+
+Under systemd on workpc, mavwaked sat at 335% of a core with the gate on and
+68% with only silero. onnxruntime sizes its thread pool to every core and spins
+between runs, and this gate runs three graphs twelve times a second. Pinning
+all three sessions to one thread brought it to 81%, so the keyword costs about
+13% of one core. The three graphs each finish in well under 80ms that way.
+
+## What was not measured
+
+No room recordings. Every negative above is a clean corpus clip. This gate
+will live among a television, a fan and the far side of a kitchen. None of
+those are in these numbers.
+
+No measurement of him. Training on his voice means copying his transcripts off
+homesrv, which is his call and has not been asked.