Welcome to the community, @Vanessa_Holland.
In my understanding, both the VAD choice and noise reduction affect the time it takes for the model to respond. However, such a large delay is definitely not helpful.
I tested this with semantic_vad
and near_field
input_audio_noise_reduction
, and was able to alleviate the slow response time by setting the eagerness
property for semantic_vad
turn_detection
to high
.