Building a Reliable ESP32-S3 Voice Satellite: I2S, PDM, and the Audio Pipeline You're Ignoring When a Home Assistant voice satellite built on ESP32-S3 misses commands, answers slowly, or cuts off mid-reply, the first instinct is to blame the wake word model or the microphone sensitivity . Those matter — but they're not the whole system. The real truth: the user experience of an ESP32-S3 voice node is determined by microphone capture → I2S/PDM timing → device-side buffering → Wi-Fi upl...