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It's Not Working - Quick Fixes

In a nutshell

Something is wrong and you just want your assistant talking again. No terminal, no programming. This page lists the most common everyday problems ("it won't listen", "I can't hear it", "it doesn't understand me") and plain fixes for each. Use voice, or a couple of taps in a settings screen. If your problem isn't here, go to What can I say? to check the exact words to use, or to Troubleshooting & Debugging for the deeper, log-reading version of this page.

First, check the basics

Before anything else, check these four things. They cause most "it's just not working" moments and take seconds to check. No terminal, no config file needed.

  • Is it muted? Look for a mute light or icon, and check the physical mute switch or button, if your device has one. There is no spoken "are you muted?" check — a muted microphone cannot hear the question anyway.
  • Is the volume up? Ask "what's the volume?" A spoken answer means the speaker path works.
  • Is it powered on? A dead device won't react to anything. Check the power light and cable before you assume a software problem.
  • Is it connected to the network? Most skills (weather, radio, trivia) need internet access. Check your router or the device's Wi-Fi indicator or settings screen if answers about the outside world fail while purely local things (time, volume) still work.

If all four check out and something's still wrong, the sections below cover the specific symptom.

flowchart TD
    A[Something's wrong] --> B{Basics OK?<br/>muted / volume / power / network}
    B -- no --> Z[Fix the basic first]
    B -- yes --> C{What's the symptom?}
    C -- "won't listen" --> D["It's not listening to me"]
    C -- "can't hear it" --> E["It's not talking back to me"]
    C -- "gets it wrong" --> F["It heard me but got it wrong"]
    C -- "don't know what to say" --> G["What can I say?"]
    D & E & F & G --> H{Still broken?}
    H -- yes --> I[Troubleshooting & Debugging]

Diagram: The flow starts at "something's wrong" and ends at Troubleshooting & Debugging if still broken, branching on the basics check and then on which symptom applies.

"It's not listening to me"

  • Say the wake word clearly, with a short pause after it. OVOS listens for a wake word (by default "Hey Mycroft") before it pays attention to anything else. Say the wake word, wait about one second, then say your request, for example "Hey Mycroft... what's the weather", instead of running the two together.
  • Check you're not muted. If a light or on-screen icon shows the microphone is muted, use the physical mute switch or button, or the on-screen control, if your device has one. A muted microphone cannot hear a voice command, so unmuting is always a button or screen action, never a spoken one.
  • Move closer, or reduce background noise. Wake-word detection is a local audio match. A TV, music, or a fan next to the microphone can make it too loud for the wake word to be heard.
  • If it never hears you at all, check the microphone itself works. See Prove the microphone and speaker work. These are copy-paste terminal commands, not settings screens, but you don't need to understand them. Just run each one and see if you get sound back.
  • The wake word keeps missing or keeps false-triggering. This is a sensitivity setting, not a hardware fault. See Wake-word Plugins for how to adjust sensitivity and trigger_level in mycroft.conf, and pick a less noise-prone wake word if needed. Unlike the fixes above, this one needs opening a text config file, not just talking to the assistant. See Make It Yours for the general edit-and-restart routine, or Accessibility if editing that file interactively (for example with a screen reader) is itself the obstacle.

"It's not talking back to me" / "It's muted"

  • Ask it to check itself. Say "what's the volume?" If you get a spoken answer, audio output works and the problem is elsewhere (see the next section).
  • Say "unmute" or "unmute volume". OVOS keeps mic-mute and speaker-mute separate. Muting the microphone does not silence the speaker, and the reverse is also true.
  • Say "volume up" or "set volume to 80". These are handled by the built-in Volume skill (ovos-skill-volume), which understands phrasing like "volume up", "quieter volume", "mute", "unmute", "toggle mute", "set volume to 50", and "what's the current volume".
  • Check the physical connections if voice control makes no difference at all. Check the speaker cable is fully seated, the powered speaker is turned on and its own volume dial is not at zero, and (on a Raspberry Pi or similar box) the audio output is routed to the jack, HDMI, or USB device you expect. See Hardware Integrators if you're building your own box and need to pick an audio path.

"It heard me but got it wrong"

  • Speak in short, plain sentences. Long, run-on requests are harder for both wake word and speech-to-text to parse than "what time is it" or "set a timer for ten minutes".
  • Check you're using words it actually understands. Every OVOS skill only reacts to specific phrasings ("intents"). What can I say? lists real, working example phrases for every skill that ships with OVOS, grouped by what they do (jokes, timers, weather, and more).
  • If it keeps mishearing the same words (names, local places), that is a speech-to-text accuracy limit, not something you can fix from voice alone. See STT Plugins if you want to try a different recognizer.

"I don't know what to say to it"

You don't need to memorize a command syntax. What can I say? is a browsable list of every skill that ships with (or can be added to) OVOS. Each skill has real usage examples from its own vocabulary, for example "tell me a joke", "what's the weather in Lisbon", "set a timer for five minutes".

"Can it be quiet at night?"

There is no quiet-hours or do-not-disturb feature: no schedule lowers the volume, disables the wake word, or silences responses at certain times. The shell's "night mode" only dims the screen. What you can do is script it yourself, for example a nightly cron job that adjusts volume or stops the listener service, and restores things in the morning.

Still broken?

If none of the above fixes it, the problem needs more digging. You still don't need to be a programmer to follow along. Troubleshooting & Debugging walks through the same journey (wake word to speech-to-text to understanding to skill to speaking) stage by stage. It shows which log file or on-screen tool proves where things went wrong.

Read next: Troubleshooting & Debugging Related: What can I say? · RaspOVOS Troubleshooting · Make it yours · Accessibility