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🏗️ Wyoming System Architecture

Wyoming is designed to act as the connective tissue between small, modular services in a voice assistant system. These services communicate over simple socket-based connections using Wyoming events.

🧩 Component-Based Design

A full voice assistant can be built from independent components:

[Mic] → [Wakeword] → [VAD] → [ASR] → [Intent] → [Handler] → [TTS] → [Speaker]

Each component runs independently, speaks the same protocol, and can be swapped out for another.

🔁 Example Event Flow

Here’s a simplified interaction flow:

  1. Wakeword detection triggers a pipeline start
  2. VAD determines when user has stopped speaking
  3. ASR transcribes the audio stream into text
  4. Intent recognizer interprets the text into structured meaning
  5. Handler processes the command and returns a result
  6. TTS converts the result back to speech

Each stage is loosely coupled, allowing fine-grained control, replacement, and scaling.

🌐 Communication Methods

Wyoming supports multiple connection types:

Transport Use Case
TCP socket Multi-host communication
Unix socket Fast local communication
stdin/stdout Embedded component process piping

All transports speak the exact same protocol format.

🧱 Microservice Separation

Each voice function lives in its own process:

Component Protocol Message Types
Wakeword Detect, Detection
ASR Transcribe, Transcript
TTS Synthesize, AudioChunk
Intent Recognize, Intent
Handle Handled, NotHandled

Each service can: - Be implemented in any language - Run on separate machines - Be restarted/upgraded independently

🖧 Example Deployment

[ESP32 Mic] → Home Assistant Server
              ├── wakeword: wyoming-openwakeword
              ├── asr: wyoming-whisper
              ├── tts: wyoming-piper
              ├── handler: native Assist or custom
              └── speaker: USB audio or Pi audio

Everything communicates through Wyoming socket connections.

🧪 Test Pipelines

For development/testing, you can chain together services locally using Unix or TCP sockets, or embed components with subprocess pipes for easier control.