claude
a99932b427
silero-vad replaces the energy threshold when -vad-model points at it. Everything after the speech decision is the same state machine: the speech hold, the silence hold, the length cap and the utterance buffer. The model window is 512 samples and the capture frame is 480, so silero.go re-chunks across frames. main.go claimed the two matched, which was true of silero v4. Stage two, the wake word, is not here. It needs a Russian keyword model that does not exist yet.
2.8 KiB
silero-vad against the energy threshold in mavwaked
Measured 2026-08-09 on homesrv. V-487, stage one of two.
mavwaked decided an utterance had started by comparing frame energy to an adaptive floor. That answers "is this frame loud". A fan, a door and a television are all loud, and every utterance mavwaked accepts becomes a turn.
silero-vad answers "is this frame speech". It is 2.3MB of ONNX and it replaces the comparison and nothing else. The speech hold, the silence hold, the length cap and the utterance buffer are the same state machine either way.
What it declines
Speech is the four piper fixtures mavsttd already scores against, so nothing
of the owner's voice is committed. Non-speech is white noise at the same RMS as the clip beside it. That is the
cheapest thing that fools an energy floor.
| clip | silero, speech frames on speech | silero on noise | energy on noise |
|---|---|---|---|
| ru_fact.wav | 59 | 0 | 68 |
| ru_query.wav | 69 | 0 | 79 |
| ru_reminder.wav | 80 | 0 | 89 |
| en_act.wav | 90 | 0 | 99 |
The energy threshold accepts every noise clip as a complete utterance. Silero
calls not one frame of any of them speech, and still hears all four spoken
clips. TestSileroHearsSpeechAndDeclinesNoise is that table.
White noise is a floor, not a proof. It says nothing about a television, which is speech, or about a fan, which is narrowband. Those need room recordings and this box has none.
What it costs
BenchmarkSileroFrame on the homesrv laptop (Ryzen 5 5600U), one 30ms frame
through the model including the re-chunking:
509µs per frame
That is 1.7% of one core, on the slower of the two machines. The detector runs on the workstation beside the microphone, never on the GPU. This number is what says it does not need one.
The window is 512 samples, not 480
cmd/mavwaked/main.go claimed the frame contract matched silero's input
exactly. That was true of silero v4. Version 5 takes exactly 512 samples at 16kHz, plus 64 samples of context from
the previous window. So sileroVAD buffers across capture frames, and a frame
completing no window inherits the previous probability. TestSileroRechunksAcrossFrames pins it.
Still an energy gate by default
-vad-model is empty in the code default, so a deployment that does not pass
it runs exactly what shipped before. Barge-in is untouched and deliberately so. It reads frame energy while she is
speaking, which is a different question from whether the frame is speech.
Not done here
The wake word. This is stage one of the two V-487 asks for. The second needs a keyword model that does not exist yet. The pretrained openWakeWord keywords are English, and a Russian one has to be trained. Until then anything spoken near the microphone still becomes a turn. It is now merely required to be speech.