Ava 0.6.7 - PATCH
First, Thank You @lone-baggie
Special thanks to @lone-baggie for putting Ava on a Portal Mini and recording what it is genuinely like to use at home. This was more than a showcase: the video let us see Ava waking, replying, and sharing the dashboard in everyday life.
Watch on YouTube: Portal Mini as Home Assistant voice satellite · Lone Baggie's channel
Ava often has several jobs at once: a dashboard stays open on the wall, music fills the living room, and someone may call for it at any moment. 0.6.7 helps those moments flow together. Music resumes where you left it, lyrics know when to wait through an instrumental break, replies are easier to read, and a page that loses its way can find home again.
Replies No Longer Crowd the Bottom Edge
After Ava wakes, recognition and response text now appears like a restrained caption below the voice orb. It finds a suitable position in portrait and landscape, stays within three lines, and changes more gently. There is no large panel covering the dashboard, and the text no longer competes with the sound animation along the bottom.
How to Enable Floating Subtitles
- Open Ava Settings -> Voice -> Voice Reply.
- Set TTS mode to Standard TTS. Streaming TTS starts speaking sooner but does not currently support floating subtitles.
- Under Interface, turn on Floating subtitle overlay.
- The first time, allow Ava to display over other apps when Android asks.
Your words and the assistant's reply will then appear over the current dashboard or app during a conversation.
Pause Now, Return to the Same Song
After pausing, tucking away the player, or briefly losing a music source, reopening the player could show an old title or forget the position and duration. Ava now remembers the cover, song, and position that were actually playing. Resume brings back the familiar view; only a real track change clears it.
Seeking, jumping backward, or changing tracks in Music Assistant also moves the player and lyrics to the right place. While the Detailed Metadata player is open for lyrics, the screensaver stays out of the way.
Path: Ava Settings -> Interaction -> Media & Playback -> Detailed metadata
Lyrics Understand Instrumental Breaks
When a song reaches an instrumental passage, the previous line should not hang around until the singer returns. Ava now turns timed gaps in the middle of a song into a gently filling ♪ display. Longer breaks receive a few more marks; when the song is ending, the lyrics simply settle without adding stray notes.
Long English lines, rap verses, and narrow screens now move more smoothly instead of stopping and jumping. In portrait, title and artist have separate lines so long metadata no longer becomes a crowded block.
Karaoke also adds community AMLL word-synced lyrics. Ava searches AMLL, LRCLIB, and QQ Music together, then considers the title, artist, album, and duration before choosing. Results arrive sooner and are less likely to confuse a studio track with a live version or another song with the same name.
Multiple Rooms Feel Like One Song
The most noticeable multi-room problem starts subtly: the living room and bedroom begin together, then slowly develop an echo. Sendspin now responds to small delays earlier without making a device repeatedly speed up and slow down. Long listening sessions and track changes stay together more consistently.
If an older device becomes overloaded or goes silent after an audio change, Ava also tries to reconnect by itself instead of leaving a player that still shows the song but produces no sound.
If wake-up feels affected on a particular device while its speaker is playing, open Ava Settings -> Voice -> Microphone -> Echo cancellation and enable Smart echo cancellation. This depends on the device's microphone and speaker behavior; it is not a general Ava wake-up issue.
Health Steward Knows How Much Rest Is Needed
An older tablet with a busy Home Assistant dashboard should not have to choose between running at full effort and stopping completely. Health Steward now eases the workload in steps. It first groups bursts of state changes before updating the screen. If a screensaver only covers the page briefly, the dashboard waits where it is; after a long absence or genuine device pressure, animations, video, and other expensive work can rest too. Revealing the page no longer means reconnecting everything from the beginning each time.
Cards outside the visible part of the screen can wait to be drawn until you scroll to them, while their entity data continues to update. A complicated custom card also no longer makes the whole page abandon optimization simply because every entity cannot be identified.
In dual-page mode, one dashboard is allowed to settle before the other begins loading, preventing two heavy pages from fighting during a cold start. The side being used stays responsive while the other takes a lighter pace. Even identical left and right addresses keep the two-pane layout the user selected. A screensaver no longer jumps over pages that are still preparing, and stopping Ava's main voice service no longer leaves an unattended black screensaver behind.
Under the Health Steward master switch, Entity stream scheduling, Chunked card rendering, and Dormant load reduction can now be controlled separately, and Entity filtering remains independent too. They are separated because every device and dashboard handles the workload differently: if a custom card is incompatible, only the relevant option needs to be turned off, while the other protections against lag, heat, and battery drain can stay enabled.
The occasional ERR_UNSAFE_PORT on the right pane after repeated refreshes is also fixed. Internal light and dark changes are no longer mistaken for websites, and clearing cache, cookies, or history from the sidebar now refreshes both active panes together.
Path: Ava Settings -> Browser -> WebView Health Steward (Beta)
Everyday Features at a Glance
The Interaction home screen is reorganized around four familiar activities: Media & Playback, Displays & Scenes, Intercom & Calls, and Entities & Shortcuts. Landscape gives the frequently used music entry more presence, while portrait keeps text and icons aligned consistently across every card.
On small screens, longer descriptions stay within two lines and can be dragged to read. Fully expanding them requires two taps, reducing accidental activation when picking up the device. Category names are also aligned across six languages.
Path: Ava Settings -> Interaction
Less Guesswork During Updates
The update page now clearly says whether it is downloading, waiting for the Android confirmation prompt, or unable to load because of the network, with a direct Retry action. Longer translated button labels resize instead of wrapping awkwardly.
Ava can also distinguish a genuinely new release from a rebuilt package carrying the same version more reliably, reducing missed updates and repeated reminders after an update is already installed.
Portal-class devices are still subject to Android install privileges. If the system refuses the package, Shizuku, root, device-owner provisioning, or adb install from a computer may still be required. Investigation continues in #164.
Portal System Bar Control
Following @realroywalker's testing in #156, portal-support 1.3.0 can leave the system bars visible, hide the top status bar, or hide both top and bottom bars from Home Assistant.
The feature is off by default and needs the appropriate system permission. An edge swipe may still reveal the bars temporarily; full Lock Task protection against system gestures is not included yet.
Other Polish
- Ambient sound detection: The former “Baby cry” label is now the more everyday “Noise,” covering crying or distress sounds and clearly warning that this category may produce more false alerts. This avoids presenting it as a dedicated baby monitor.
- Manual voiceprint recording no longer mistakes normal-volume or shorter speech for “not heard” so easily, while genuine silence still asks you to try again.
- The Mod update footer now adapts its text to the available width, so the author's name is no longer squeezed out.
- The Root page now clearly explains that Ava works without Root. On an already rooted device, Root is simply an optional path to higher privileges.
- Noise suppression and echo cancellation preview cards are no longer covered by the Voice Stats handle.
- After pause and resume, the music button, position, and duration remain consistent.
- Update states, Interaction categories, and lyric-source labels are aligned across supported languages.
