Repository navigation
Expose an ambient noise level (one dB number, no audio) to Home Assistant and plugins #910
Description
Describe the feature
A single number for how loud the room is, in dB, available as:
- An ESPHome sensor on the kiosk's device, for example Ambient noise level, dBFS,
state_class: measurement, diagnostic, off by default. - The plugin host API, as a
host.readcommand such asgetNoiseLevel, and a slowhost.subscribeevent such asaudio.noise.
Privacy: a level, not the microphone
I don't want plugins or Home Assistant to get any audio, and I'd suggest:
- One loudness figure only. No audio, no spectrum, no speech detection.
- Coarse and slow. Rounded to whole dB, averaged over about 5 seconds, updated no more than every 5 seconds or on a change of about 2 dB.
- Not during voice turns. Hold the last value while Voice Satellite is listening or answering, so speech can't be inferred from it.
- Not its own sound. Hold the value, or flag it, while the kiosk plays sound itself (answers, chimes, media), so it doesn't measure itself.
- No extra recording. Use the level the app already computes for the wake-word tester and noise gate. Report nothing when wake word detection is off, rather than opening the microphone.
- Off by default, with a switch under Microphone settings, and a plugin capability so users can see which plugins read it.
Suggested shapes (adjust as you see fit)
getNoiseLevel→{ available, dbfs, floorDbfs, held, updated }heldis true while a voice turn or the kiosk's own playback is freezing the value.
- Event
ks.audio.noise→{ dbfs, held }
Use case
To change volume with the room. Quieter answers and chimes when the house is silent at night, louder when the TV is on.
Plugins can already call setVolume and know when voice is active through voice.state and wakeword.detected. The missing piece is how loud the room is.
esphome-adaptive-volume does this on ESP32 voice boards, scaling speech volume between a quiet threshold (-55 dBFS) and a loud one (-38 dBFS). The same idea would work on kiosks. #858 did the same kind of thing for ambient light.
Devices this matters on
Echo Show 8 (1st gen) on LineageOS 18.1, using vsWakeWord. Two of them in the same home.
For reference, the remote admin's mic meter reads about 0.002 RMS (about -54 dBFS) in a quiet bedroom. That sits right at the adaptive-volume project's "quiet" point, so its defaults look about right for these devices.
Activity
jxlarrea commentedon Oct 8, 2026
This is a great idea, I'll add it to the next release.
jxlarrea commentedon Oct 8, 2026
Home Assistant: every kiosk's ESPHome device now has an Ambient noise sensor in dBFS (
state_class: measurement). It's on by default rather than disabled. If you don't want it, add it to Settings > ESPHome > Excluded entities and it stays out of Home Assistant. A real change reaches Home Assistant right away. A level that keeps moving, like a TV playing all evening, is held to one update every 30 seconds so it can't flood the recorder.Plugins: a new
noisecapability, declared alongsidehost.read, unlocks:getNoiseLevel→{ available, dbfs, held, updated }audio.noiseevent →{ available, dbfs, held }A plugin without
noisein its manifest can't read it.How it follows your privacy points:
availableis false and the sensor reads unknown.heldstays true until a clean reading replaces the value.I left out
floorDbfs. Fixed thresholds like the adaptive-volume project's -55 and -38 dBFS don't need it.The reading moves with Microphone gain, so set the gain first, then watch the sensor for a day to find your room's quiet and loud levels before picking thresholds. Sound from dashboard web pages and the DLNA video player can't be told apart from the room, so it counts as noise.
Expose the room's ambient noise level to Home Assistant and plugins (#…
pawelkw commentedon Oct 11, 2026
On a Poco Pad M1 the Ambient noise sensor in HA always reports "Unknown". The "Microphone level" in "Microphone settings" readout in the Kiosk app itself is working however and shows correct values.
App version
[2026.10.20 (318)]
Build
release
Package
me.jxl.kiosk_satellite
Please fix.