ESP_SR library works, sometimes

[requireiot]

I am trying to use the ESP32 speech recognition library, with the Arduino framework, with limited success ...

Hardware: an ESP32-S3 Dev Module with 16M flash and 8M PSRAM, with an INMP441 digital microphone and a MAX98357A DAC with a small speaker.

Software: a simple sketch using ESP_SR and ESP_I2S, which can either do voice recording and playback (to test the hardware), or speech recognition.

Environment #1: Arduino IDE 2.3.6
GOOD: Voice recording and playback works
GOOD: Speech recognition works
This reports as
- Arduino Core 3.3.0
- SDK v5.5-1-gb66b5448e0
- MC Quantized wakenet9: wakeNet9_v1h24_Hi,ESP_3_0.63_0.635, tigger:v3, mode:2, p:0, (Nov 5 2024 16:02:49)
- Quantized8 Multinet5: MN5Q8_v2_english_8_0.9_0.90, beam search:v2, (Nov 5 2024 16:02:48)

Environment #2: VSCode with the ESP-IDF extension 1.10.2 and Arduino-as-a-component
GOOD: Voice recording and playback works
BAD: Speech recognition does nothing, the wakeword is not recognized.
This reports as
- Arduino Core 3.3.2
- SDK v5.5.1
- MC Quantized wakenet9: wakeNet9_v1h24_Hi,ESP_3_0.63_0.635, tigger:v4, mode:0, p:0, (Aug 11 2025 15:20:50)
- Quantized8 Multinet5: MN5Q8_v2_english_8_0.9_0.90, beam search:v2, (Aug 11 2025 15:20:49)

Environment #3: VSCode with Platformio extension, framework=espidf, platform=espressif32@^6.12.0
GOOD: Voice recording and playback works
BAD: Speech recognition does nothing, the wakeword is not recognized.
This reports as
- Arduino Core 3.3.2
- SDK v5.5.0
- MC Quantized wakenet9: wakeNet9_v1h24_Hi,ESP_3_0.63_0.635, tigger:v4, mode:0, p:0, (Aug 11 2025 15:20:50)
- Quantized8 Multinet5: MN5Q8_v2_english_8_0.9_0.90, beam search:v2, (Aug 11 2025 15:20:49)

Environment 4: VSCode with the "Arduino Community Edition" 0.7.2 extension
GOOD: Voice recording and playback works
BAD: Speech recognition does nothing, the wakeword is not recognized.
This reports as
- Arduino Core 3.3.0
- SDK v5.5-1-gb66b5448e0
- MC Quantized wakenet9: wakeNet9_v1h24_Hi,ESP_3_0.63_0.635, tigger:v3, mode:2, p:0, (Nov 5 2024 16:02:49)
- Quantized8 Multinet5: MN5Q8_v2_english_8_0.9_0.90, beam search:v2, (Nov 5 2024 16:02:48)

Thoughts?