Sealed cube speaker for voice - do you drill a port hole or leave it shut?

I ran into basially the same problem with a mic I buried inside a wooden radio cabinet build last year. Wake word recognition was hopeless til I realised the mic was hearing the room through an inch of dead air behind a sealed panel. I drilled a 3 mm hole on the underside near the back edge, angled so light and dust can't get straight in, and the difference was immediate. It went from needing to be within arm's reach to picking me up from the other side of the kitchen consistently.

If you want it invisible, put the hole somewhere it's covered by a grille or trim rather than the top face. A tiny gap behind fabric grille cloth does the same job and you'd never spot it. I'd also fold a bit of speaker mesh or an old stocking over the inside of the hole so dust doesn't migrate in over the years. People overthink this, the mic just wants a clear path to the room, it doesn't care how it gets there.

On power, mine sits on a shelf so it's on mains, but I did experiment with a battery for a month. The suspend current on those boards is low but wake word detection keeps the CPU busy, so realistically you're charging every few days. I pulled it and never looked back. Plugged in and forgotten is the honest answer unless the socket is somewhere awkward.

I took a diferent path with mine. Instead of fighting the shell, I moved the cube to the front edge of the shelf and angled it slightly down toward where we actually sit, and wake word hits went from maybe half the time to nearly always. Most of my misses turned out to be the mic picking up reflections off the wall behind it, not the sealed case itself. Cost nothing but ten minutes of shuffling things around. Mine lives on an open bookshelf though, so if yours is tucked in a corner with stuff around it, this may not transfer.

I also stopped leaning on the wake word for anything that matters. Mine mostly gets triggered by a wireless button on the coffee table and by time-based automations, so voice is a bonus rather than the main way in. If your whole setup depends on spoken commands all day, the drilled hole probaly makes more sense than it does for my use. On power, plug it in. I tried running one on a power bank early on and always-listening detection flattened it inside a day, which surprised me given how small the board is. Standby is one thing but constant mic duty is a steady draw. Since yours just sits on a shelf anyway, I would not even bother with the battery path, just leave the cable neat along the back and forget about it.

The angling thing checks out from my side too. Mine sat on a hollow particleboard shelf and once I shuffled it toward the front edge the wake word got way more reliable, but the wierd part was the shelf itself acting like a soundboard. Fridge compressor two rooms over would set it off. A bit of dense foam under the base sorted that out in five minutes. So if anyone tries the repositioning trick and it's still flaky, check what the cube is actually sitting on before blaming the sealed case.

I had similar trouble with one of these cube speakers I stuck inside a ceramic plant pot to hide it. It went nearly deaf until I realised the pot was basically a solid wall. Moved it so the top of the cube sat just above the pot rim and it hears me fine now, no drilling needed. My setup is different since I don't mind seeing a bit of it, but if the seam idea works I'd love that. Does the gap between the lid and body on those cubes actually let sound through, or is it glued shut?