Microphone Plugins in OVOS¶

In a nutshell

A microphone plugin is the part that listens. It grabs the sound coming in from your device's microphone and hands it to the rest of the assistant so it can hear you. Different devices and setups need different ways of capturing that sound, so these plugins let you switch the "ears" without changing anything else. Think of it like choosing which microphone to plug into a recorder. See the Glossary for unfamiliar terms.

Microphone plugins in Open Voice OS (OVOS) are responsible for capturing audio input and feeding the raw PCM stream to the listener. They let you swap audio backends and platforms without touching the rest of the voice stack.

The audio-capture mechanism is deployer-defined and sits outside the formal audio-input service contract. The listener consumes whatever a microphone plugin produces. See the OVOS-AUDIO-IN-1 specification for how captured audio enters the utterance lifecycle.

Usage Guide¶

To use a microphone plugin in OVOS:

Install the desired plugin with pip:

pip install ovos-microphone-plugin-<name>

Update your mycroft.conf (or mycroft.conf) to specify the plugin:

{
 "listener": {
   "microphone": {
     "module": "ovos-microphone-plugin-alsa"  // or another plugin
   }
 }
}

Restart OVOS to apply the new microphone plugin configuration.

Supported Microphone Plugins¶

Plugin	Description	OS Compatibility	Maturity
ovos-microphone-plugin-alsa	Based on pyalsaaudio. Offers low-latency and high performance on ALSA-compatible devices.	Linux	Stable
ovos-microphone-plugin-pyaudio	Uses the PyAudio PortAudio bindings directly (no `speech_recognition` dependency). Good cross-platform general-purpose plugin.	Linux, macOS, Windows	Beta
ovos-microphone-plugin-sounddevice	Built on python-sounddevice. Offers cross-platform support.	Linux, macOS, Windows	Stable
ovos-microphone-plugin-files	Uses audio files as input instead of a live microphone. Ideal for testing and debugging.	Linux, macOS, Windows	Stable

Maturity reflects repository health (age, activity, open issues/PRs, in-repo docs), not version. See the Maturity Scale.

Writing your own microphone plugin

Building a plugin for a new audio backend instead of using one from the table? The Microphone interface, a full walkthrough, and standalone usage patterns live on the Microphone Plugin Development page.

Configuration Notes¶

Most plugins in the table above need no extra configuration beyond module. When you do need to override something — for example pinning a specific input device on ovos-microphone-plugin-sounddevice — the plugin's settings go in a nested block keyed by the plugin name (omit the block entirely when you have nothing to override):

ovos-microphone-plugin-sounddevice¶

{
  "listener": {
    "microphone": {
      "module": "ovos-microphone-plugin-sounddevice",
      "ovos-microphone-plugin-sounddevice": {"device": "hw:1,0"}
    }
  }
}

Read next: VAD Plugins Related: Microphone Plugin Development · Choosing Plugins · Wake-word Plugins · STT Plugins