Not an issue just a suggestions... please add "energy" as a public variable so that people can monitor it.
In my use case, I updated my local copy to expose "energy" and use it to show a volume meter as the speech is coming in.
energy = audioop.rms(buffer, source.SAMPLE_WIDTH) # energy of the audio signal
self.current_energy = energy
then I pull sr.current_energy and set the volume indicator accordingly.
LOVE YOUR PRODUCT! Thank you very much!