mirror of
https://github.com/jamiepine/voicebox.git
synced 2026-09-16 21:30:39 -07:00
feat: 0.5.0 Capture release — dictation, MCP, personalities (#544)
* feat(capture): dictation, personalities, 0.5.0 Ships the Capture release end to end. Global-hotkey dictation with synthetic paste into the focused app on macOS and Windows, an on-screen pill across recording / transcribing / refining, customizable push-to- talk and toggle chords, and an accessibility-permission prompt scoped to Settings → Captures with inline re-check feedback. Voice profiles gain optional personalities that power compose / rewrite / respond actions via a local Qwen3 LLM — shared with refinement, so there is one local LLM in the app, not two. Refinement hardened with deterministic Whisper-loop collapse before the LLM sees the transcript, per-capture flag snapshots for re-runs, and a ten-transcript evaluation harness across every bundled refinement size. Version bump 0.4.5 → 0.5.0. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]> * feat(mcp): local MCP server exposes voicebox.* tools to AI agents Mounts FastMCP at /mcp (Streamable HTTP) so Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, and the VS Code MCP extensions can call voicebox.speak, voicebox.transcribe, voicebox.list_captures, and voicebox.list_profiles against the running Voicebox server. Backend - new backend/mcp_server package (tools, middleware, profile resolve, pub/sub events); named mcp_server to avoid shadowing the installed mcp PyPI package FastMCP imports internally - app.py migrated from @app.on_event to lifespan= so FastMCP's session manager cohabits with Voicebox's startup/shutdown - new MCPClientBinding table + /mcp/bindings CRUD; ClientIdMiddleware reads X-Voicebox-Client-Id into a ContextVar and stamps last_seen_at - profile resolution precedence: explicit -> per-client binding -> capture_settings.default_playback_voice_id - POST /speak REST wrapper for non-MCP callers (shell, ACP, A2A) - GET /events/speak SSE broadcasts speak-start / speak-end so the pill surfaces agent-initiated speech - backend/mcp_shim proxy (plain httpx) for stdio-only MCP clients - PyInstaller spec updates + new --shim build target (~18 MB) Frontend - Settings -> MCP page with HTTP / stdio / claude-mcp-add copy snippets, default voice picker, per-client bindings table, connection status - useMCPBindings, useSpeakEvents hooks - CapturePill gains 'speaking' state; DictateWindow subscribes to SSE and emits dictate:show so the Rust side surfaces the pill window Native - tauri.conf.json externalBin now includes voicebox-mcp - show_dictate_window helper + dictate:show listener in main.rs - (also in this commit: InputMonitoringGate UX, hotkey_monitor tweaks, landing footer/navbar updates, new overview docs for captures / dictation / mcp-server / voice-personalities) Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]> * feat(mcp): Rust-owned speaking pill with self-contained audio playback The pill window now surfaces for agent-initiated speech without main-window involvement. Rust subscribes to /events/speak via a tokio task + reqwest streaming body (speak_monitor.rs), shows the pill, and forwards events to the dictate webview over Tauri's event bus. The pill plays audio via a plain HTMLAudioElement and emits dictate:hide when playback ends. The pill stays hidden through the ~1 s generation wait and only surfaces when audio actually starts, with the counter armed at that moment. Fixes a shared-dict mutation in mcp_server/events.publish() that caused the second subscriber (Rust speak_monitor) to receive `event: message` instead of named speak-start/speak-end frames. Also teaches the speak_monitor parser to handle CRLF framing (sse-starlette default). Main-window AudioPlayer now skips autoplay for source in {mcp, rest} to avoid double-play when both windows are alive. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]> * readme and dev script * feat(capture): gate global hotkey on dictation readiness checklist Stops the "stuck pill" failure where pressing the chord with missing STT/LLM models triggers a recording that has nowhere to land. The hotkey now stays disarmed until every gate (models downloaded, Input Monitoring + Accessibility granted) is green; the empty-state checklist in CapturesTab surfaces each unmet gate with a one-click action and auto-arms the chord once everything turns green. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]> * color * model download status * progress * personality: bool API, i18n across the app - Collapse intent tri-state (respond/rewrite/compose) to `personality: bool` on /generate, /speak, and voicebox.speak. Drop respond entirely; keep compose as a standalone button via /profiles/{id}/compose. Remove /rewrite, /respond, and /speak profile endpoints. - FloatingGenerateBox: Wand2 persona toggle + Dices compose button appear when the selected profile has a personality. ProfileCard badges Wand2 alongside the effects Sparkles. - MCP bindings: default_intent column → default_personality: bool. Migration drops the legacy column. - i18n: en / ja / zh-CN / zh-TW translation files filled out and wired through the capture, server, and profile UI. ```ts voicebox.speak({ text: "Deploy complete.", profile: "Morgan", personality: true, // rewrite through the profile's personality LLM }); ``` * i18n: GenerationPage sidebar copy * fix: BOOL import for windows crate 0.62 BOOL moved from Win32::Foundation to windows::core in 0.62. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <[email protected]> * fix(capture): layout-aware V keycode for synthetic paste on macOS macOS apps match Cmd+V against the layout-translated character via NSMenu key equivalents, so posting kVK_ANSI_V (= 9, the QWERTY V position) on Dvorak produces Cmd+. and never triggers Paste. New keyboard_layout module resolves the active layout's V keycode via TISCopyCurrentKeyboardLayoutInputSource + UCKeyTranslate, caches it in an AtomicU16, and refreshes on kTISNotifySelectedKeyboardInputSourceChanged. All TIS calls run on the main thread (init from Tauri setup; observer callback delivered to the main runloop); synthetic_keys::send_paste reads the cached value once per paste. Falls back to kVK_ANSI_V when resolution fails or the active input source carries no Unicode key layout data. Windows is intentionally left on hardcoded VK_V — SendInput delivers WM_KEYDOWN with wParam = VK_V to the target regardless of the active layout, which is why `Send "^v"` works for AutoHotkey on Dvorak Windows. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]> * fix(capture): cooperative app activation for synthetic paste on macOS 14+ macOS 14 deprecated NSRunningApplication.activateWithOptions: in favour of a cooperative-activation pattern: the caller first yields activation rights to the target, then the target activate()s against the tightened Sonoma foreground rules. Without the yield, activate() on 14+ sometimes silently fails or only bounces the dock icon — the exact "paste lands in the wrong app" symptom we were previously one API break away from. activate_pid now discovers the 14+ selector via respondsToSelector: and branches: on 14+ it yieldActivationToApplication:'s from NSRunningApplication.current then calls -activate on the target; on 11–13 it stays on -activateWithOptions: (still the only option). Both branches propagate the BOOL return — if activation is refused we error out before clobbering the clipboard instead of silently proceeding. The respondsToSelector: result is cached in a OnceLock so the probe isn't repeated on every paste. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]> * fix(capture): conditional clipboard restore + always-attempt on paste failure Two bugs in paste_final_text' clipboard handling: 1. Restore was unconditional. If the user ⌘C'd in the target app during the 400 ms paste-consume window — or a clipboard history tool (Paste, Pastebot, Maccy) or Universal Clipboard sync snapshotted our staged text — the blind restore overwrote their newer content with the pre-paste snapshot, silently losing user data. 2. send_paste' errors were propagated with ? before the restore, so a CGEventPost / SendInput failure left the user's clipboard stuck on the transcript. Fix folds both into one pattern: capture the post-write change count, re-read it after paste-consume, restore only when they match (plus treat a change-count read failure as "unknown, don't overwrite"). Isolate send_paste's error so the restore runs regardless of paste success, then propagate the paste error after. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]> * chore(deps): pin rdev to jamiepine/rdev fork Upstream Narsil/rdev has shipped no release since 2023-06 (crates.io still serves 0.5.3), so the Sonoma main-thread fix we depend on — PR #147, applied at hotkey_monitor.rs:184 — is only reachable via a git pin. A pin to a third-party repo breaks the build whenever the remote force-pushes, renames, or is taken down, and Cargo does not durably cache git-dep archives the way it does crates.io tarballs. Forking to jamiepine/rdev at the same SHA removes that failure mode without changing crate behavior and gives us a place to cherry-pick future OS-compatibility fixes on our own timeline. The SHA was verified to exist on the fork before re-pinning. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]> * fix(mcp): idle timeout + escalating backoff for speak-SSE monitor Two reliability gaps in the /events/speak subscriber: 1. resp.chunk().await had no idle timeout. A backend that accepts the TCP connection but stops producing frames (deadlocked SSE endpoint, zombie process) would block the task forever without reconnecting. The pill window would never surface for agent-initiated speech and there would be nothing to log. Backend emits a `:ping` heartbeat every 15 s, so 45 s without any data is now treated as a dead stream — the task errors out and the reconnect loop takes over. 2. Flat 2 s backoff escalates nowhere. Logs fill with reconnect lines when the backend is down for minutes, and a backend that accepts + immediately closes connections (no data) spins the loop tightly. Backoff now escalates 500 ms → 30 s on unproductive rounds and resets only when at least one frame arrives (the connection was genuinely productive, not just accepted). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]> * fix(refinement): character-level loop collapse + pytest coverage The word-level pass catches single-word Whisper loops ("URL URL URL…") but misses two common hallucination patterns the PR had to claim as "edge cases": 1. Multi-word English loops — "thanks for watching thanks for watching…" × 6 sails through because no two consecutive tokens are identical after text.split(). 2. CJK loops — "謝謝觀看" × 7 sails through because text.split() returns a single unsplit token for the whole loop (no whitespace between characters). Add a character-level second pass: a non-greedy regex finds any 2–60 char substring that repeats min_run+ times immediately after itself and strips the run. The 2-char floor keeps emphasised single-letter runs ("wooooooow") intact. The 60-char ceiling covers every observed Whisper tail hallucination ("Please like and subscribe to my channel.", "Subtitles by the Amara.org community") while staying short enough that coincidental long-phrase repetition in legitimate speech doesn't hit the threshold. Whitespace normalisation only runs when the pass actually stripped something, so untouched transcripts keep their original spacing. New test_refinement_collapse.py gives the pre-processor its first deterministic unit-test coverage: 17 tests pinning the word-level legacy behaviour plus the new multi-word English / CJK / Japanese / emphasis-preservation cases. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]> * fix(db): graceful fallback when SQLite < 3.35 on MCP bindings migration SQLite gained ALTER TABLE … DROP COLUMN in 3.35 (Mar 2021). Production PyInstaller builds bundle Python 3.12 which links to SQLite 3.40+ so that path is always safe, but a dev running the backend directly on Ubuntu 20.04 (3.31) or Debian 11 (3.34) would crash on first startup trying to drop the legacy default_intent column. Add _supports_drop_column(engine) — returns True on non-SQLite dialects (Postgres / MySQL have supported DROP COLUMN for decades) and gates on the runtime sqlite_version for SQLite. When unsupported, log a warning and leave the unused column in place: SQLAlchemy only maps declared columns, so a stray default_intent column does no reads or writes and can't interfere with runtime behaviour. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]> * fix(mcp): correct lifespan shutdown order — drain MCP before unloading models The inline lifespan ran _run_shutdown inside the MCP context, so the TTS / Whisper / LLM models were unloaded *before* FastMCP's __aexit__ got a chance to cancel its in-flight session tasks. Any MCP request mid-generate at shutdown time would crash on "model unloaded" instead of receiving a clean session-cancelled error. Rewire via compose_lifespan (which was already defined in mcp_server.server for exactly this purpose but never used): AsyncExitStack enters factories in order and exits in LIFO, so MCP teardown fires first — cancelling sessions — and _run_shutdown runs after nothing is holding the models. Smoke test shows the log order flipped as expected: Ready StreamableHTTP session manager started ... running ... StreamableHTTP session manager shutting down ← was last, now first Voicebox server shutting down... ← was first, now last As a side benefit, _run_shutdown is now paired with _run_startup via try/finally inside voicebox_lifespan, so a partial startup (models half-loaded, MCP __aenter__ fails) still unloads whatever was loaded instead of leaking it to process exit. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]> * fix(mcp): stamp last_seen_at on /speak too + tighten path predicate POST /speak is a REST wrapper around voicebox.speak for agents that don't talk MCP (shell scripts, ACP, A2A). It reads X-Voicebox-Client-Id and uses it for the same per-client profile resolution + default personality lookup the MCP tool does (speak.py:39-64), so its callers are first-class clients — but the ClientIdMiddleware only stamped last_seen_at on /mcp* paths. REST speak callers showed up as "never seen" in Settings → MCP despite actively acting on their bindings. Widen the stamp predicate to an explicit ("/mcp", "/speak") prefix list, and require a path boundary on match so future routes named /mcpfoo or /speakers don't silently inherit the stamp via the prefix. New test_client_id_middleware.py pins the scope with 17 parametrised cases (both the allowed set and the overlap cases that must not match). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]> * feat(captures): scrubbable WaveSurfer player for capture detail view Replace the placeholder fake-waveform + play button in CapturesTab's audio card with a real CaptureInlinePlayer (wavesurfer.js). The player renders the actual waveform, lets users scrub through the clip, and shows a proper current/total timestamp pair in place of the duration-only label. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]> * feat(ui): persist selectedProfileId across sessions Wrap useUIStore in zustand/middleware's persist under the key voicebox-ui. partialize only selectedProfileId so volatile UI state (dialog open flags, form drafts, engine/voice pickers, sidebar) stays in-memory as before — but reopening the app no longer loses whichever profile the user was last working with. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]> * feat(captures): mirror readiness checklist into the settings sidebar The six-gate checklist only rendered in the CapturesTab empty state, so a user already on the settings page had no single surface showing which gate was red — the inline InputMonitoringNotice covered one, the model pickers covered another, and Accessibility was only hinted at by the auto-paste toggle. Mirror the same component into the right sidebar of the settings page so every gate (STT model, LLM model, Input Monitoring, Accessibility, plus the hotkey toggle in the main column) is always visible while the user configures dictation. New compact prop on DictationReadinessChecklist drops the centered header and empty-state max-width so it fits the 280 px sidebar next to the existing About / Differences blocks. Callers in compact mode own the heading — CapturesPage reuses the existing captures.readiness.title key (present in en / ja / zh-CN / zh-TW already) as an h3 matching the sibling sidebar sections. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]> * feat(captures): move sidebar checklist below differences + hide when all green Two small follow-ups to the sidebar checklist placement. Move it below the What's different section so the sticky top of the sidebar stays the page's narrative context (About → differences) and the checklist reads as a status panel rather than preamble. Gate the whole block on !readiness.allReady so once every gate is green the sidebar drops back to just About + What's different — no value in real estate full of checkmarks. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]> * fix(captures): refetch readiness immediately after STT/LLM model swap useCaptureSettings updated its own cache optimistically but never invalidated ['capture-readiness'], so for up to 5 s (the poll interval) after switching stt_model or llm_model the checklist kept showing the previous model's ready/missing state. The backend endpoint resolves the model live on each call — it was just the frontend cache that lagged. Invalidate in onSettled only when the patch touched a model field, so unrelated updates (chord keys, toggles) don't pay for a refetch. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]> * fix(captures): hide macOS-only copy when running on Windows / Linux Two surfaces leaked macOS-specific copy onto other platforms: 1. The Input Monitoring + Accessibility rows in the readiness checklist rendered everywhere. On Windows/Linux the Rust permission stubs return true, so the rows showed as permanent green checkmarks with copy like "macOS allows Voicebox to detect your global shortcut." — nonsense when you're on Windows. Gate both rows on a userAgent-based isMacOS check so they only render where the underlying TCC permission actually exists. 2. The global-shortcut setting description ended with "macOS will ask for Input Monitoring permission the first time you turn this on." That sentence rendered on every platform. The readiness checklist already surfaces the TCC requirement at the right moment on macOS, so the description doesn't need the platform note — drop it from en / ja / zh-CN / zh-TW. Other macOS strings (AccessibilityNotice, InputMonitoringNotice, their "stillMissing" hints) are already gated behind the Rust permission booleans returning false, which never happens on Windows/Linux, so they stay inert without further changes. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]> * feat(capture): swap the rdev fork for keytap 0.2, delete local chord state machine Dep swap: - Drop the git-pinned jamiepine/rdev fork we were carrying since the upstream crate is abandoned. - Depend on keytap 0.2 from crates.io — our own cross-platform global keyboard tap crate. Clean shutdown via Drop, Sonoma-safe by design (no TSMGetInputSourceProperty calls off the main thread, so `set_is_main_thread(false)` is gone), and properly versioned. Chord engine rewrite: - Delete hotkey_monitor.rs's internal Chord state machine (Match enum, KeyEvent enum, step()/classify() methods, associated unit tests). keytap's ChordMatcher subsumes it: Momentary chord for PTT, add_toggle() for Toggle-to-talk, longest-match resolution, sticky-end for Toggle. Net: -80 LOC in hotkey_monitor.rs; the remaining module is the dispatcher loop + Effect→Tauri translation. - Preserve the PTT→Toggle "RestartRecording" upgrade signal. keytap emits End(PTT)+Start(Toggle) atomically (same Instant) when the held set upgrades from a shorter chord to a longer superset. The dispatcher peeks at the matcher with a 5 ms recv_timeout after any End and coalesces the pair into Effect::RestartRecording so the frontend still gets the "discard the transition-moment audio" signal instead of an unrelated Stop+Start pair. - HotkeyMonitor::update_bindings now actually tears down the tap on empty bindings instead of leaving an idle CGEventTap around. New bindings rebuild the matcher and the dispatcher thread from scratch. key_codes.rs: - Rewrite the browser-code → Key table against keytap's cleaner Key variant names (`A`..`Z` not `KeyA`..`KeyZ`, `Digit0`..`Digit9` not `Num0`..`Num9`, `ArrowUp` not `UpArrow`, `AltLeft`/`AltRight` instead of `Alt`/`AltGr`, `Period` not `Dot`, …). On-disk chord string format (W3C `KeyboardEvent.code` identifiers) is unchanged, so capture_settings rows written before the swap round-trip identically. Legacy aliases (`Alt`, `AltGr`, `Num0`, `UpArrow`, `Dot`, …) kept for forward-compat on old rows. main.rs / input_monitoring.rs: - Update the few doc comments that referenced `rdev::listen` to describe keytap's Tap; no behavioural change. - build_chord_bindings now imports from keytap::Key. - enable_hotkey / disable_hotkey / update_chord_bindings reach into HotkeyMonitor via &mut since apply()/update_bindings() now mutate. Tests live in keytap now (22 chord-related tests in keytap 0.2, including the PTT→Toggle upgrade scenario that used to be tested in hotkey_monitor.rs). Voicebox's hotkey_monitor.rs is thin enough that local testing would be trivia. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]> * chore(deps): bump keytap 0.2 → 0.4 for macOS modifier-events fix 0.2 read CGEventFlags via CGEventGetIntegerValueField(event, 0x81), which is not a valid CGEventField id — macOS silently returned 0, so FlagsChanged events produced no KeyDown / KeyUp for any modifier key and the PTT / toggle chords never armed on macOS. 0.4 uses the documented CGEventGetFlags(event) API. 0.3 (tracing / serde / Fn / IntlBackslash) is picked up as a free consequence; no API surface we depend on changed. * perf(captures): stop polling readiness once both models are green useQuery was firing GET /capture/readiness every 5s forever, and also on every window focus. Once stt.ready and llm.ready are both true the answer can only change when the user swaps a model in settings, and useSettings already invalidates the query on that path — the polling was pure noise. Gate both refetchInterval and refetchOnWindowFocus on "not fully ready" so we fall silent once the checklist is green. * feat(ui): theme settings, stories polish, track editor restructure - add dark/light/system theme with persisted choice + OS change listener - restyle stories sidebar (search, item layout, border) to match captures - move floating generate box to right column of stories, add top fade mask - story track editor: sticky track labels aligned via flex rows, custom scrollbar with left/right zoom handles - capture pill light mode pass, fix inline waveform progress color - pull mcp_server hidden imports into the pyinstaller spec - notarization doc draft * fix mlx llm bundling * feat(ui): shared ListPane primitive + misc polish ListPane is a compound component (Header / TitleRow / Title / Actions / Search / Scroll) that owns the relative wrapper, faded right divider (50px top fade), top scroll mask, and absolute-positioned header used by every list-detail tab. Wires up CapturesTab, StoryList, and EffectsList. EffectsTab gets -mx-8 / pr-8 to match the edge-to-edge layout used elsewhere. Other changes: - MCPPage: native <select> → shadcn <Select> for default voice and per-binding voice pickers - Button outline variant: add hover:border-accent - Drop hover:text-destructive from trailing delete buttons (HistoryTable, GpuAcceleration, GpuPage, EffectsChainEditor, EffectsDetail) - HistoryTable empty state moved behind t('history.empty') - StoryContent scroll padding pt-14 → pt-16 - backend health reports the captures dir - landing CapturesMockup: "Send to" → "Export" with Download icon - CHANGELOG: drop [Unreleased] personality section * fix(captures): Play As autoplay + default voice + orphan recovery - Hand /generate ids to the global SSE watcher so playback fires on completion. The mutation onSuccess was checking audio_path on a queued row, which is always empty — autoplay never ran. - Bind the Play As voice selection to capture_settings.default_playback_voice_id, kept in sync with the Settings → Captures and Settings → MCP pickers. Picking from the split-button dropdown writes back to settings. - Extract AudioBars from HistoryTable into a shared component; use it for the Play As generating state in place of Loader2. - Stop the active-state hover from flashing white text when the button is in its lighter accent/10 fill. - Drop the gradient avatar swatches from the Settings → Captures voice dropdown. - Backend: when the gen worker exits without writing a terminal status (e.g. SQLite lock racing the failed-status write inside its own exception handler), the cancel endpoint now flips the row to failed instead of 409-ing. Worker also force-fails on its way out as a belt-and-suspenders. * fix(captures+chord): Stop button stops, ChordPicker accepts shorter chords Two unrelated correctness bugs caught in PR review: - The Play As "Stop" button was wired to handlePlayAs() unconditionally, so clicking it during playback kicked a fresh generation instead of halting. Now pauses the player when the click came from the main button while playbackState is 'playing'. Picking a different voice from the dropdown still kicks a new generation as before. - ChordPicker tracked the peak set of held keys but seeded the peak from initialKeys, so a user who opened the picker with a 3-key chord saved couldn't replace it with a 2-key chord — the candidate length never beat the seed. The peak now resets on the first press of a fresh sequence (when no keys were held immediately prior), then grows monotonically within that hold. * fix(settings): honor explicit null on nullable fields, ignore on the rest Routes were calling model_dump(exclude_none=True), which drops every client-sent null before it reaches the service. The service then layered on its own `if value is not None` guard. Net effect: setting a nullable column back to null was a no-op — the MCPPage default-voice picker sends null when the user picks "no default" and the row was silently keeping whatever was there before. Switched the routes to exclude_unset=True so absent fields stay absent but explicit nulls survive the dump, and centralised the per-field nullability check in the service. The check inspects the SQLAlchemy column metadata so non-nullable columns (stt_model, llm_model, the chord key lists) still drop nulls instead of crashing the request, while default_playback_voice_id can finally be cleared. * fix(captures): clean up audio files when create_capture fails The create flow wrote raw audio (and a transcoded .wav for non-wav sources) to data/captures before the DB row was committed, so any failure between the write and the commit — a webm that decoded to a 0-length array, a whisper model that errored mid-transcribe, a SQLite contention on the commit — left the audio on disk with nothing pointing at it. Over enough flaky uploads the directory grows without bound. Now every path written before the commit is tracked in a list, and the whole stretch from the first write to db.commit() runs inside a try/except that unlinks each tracked file on raise and re-raises. The transcode branch removes the raw file from the cleanup list only when the unlink actually succeeds, so an OSError on the raw-path delete still hands cleanup the original blob to retry. * fix(mcp): restrict voicebox.transcribe(audio_path=...) to loopback audio_path mode took any absolute filesystem path and returned its decoded contents as transcribed text with no caller verification beyond the existence/size checks. The X-Voicebox-Client-Id middleware records the header but never rejects an absent or fake one, so a Voicebox bound to 0.0.0.0 (the documented "remote access" mode) was effectively an unauthenticated arbitrary-local-file read primitive. The middleware now stashes the request's remote address in a ContextVar alongside the existing client_id, and audio_path mode refuses anything that doesn't parse as a loopback address (IPv4 127.0.0.0/8, IPv6 ::1). audio_base64 mode is unchanged — that path was always bounded to bytes the caller already has. Loopback callers (the Tauri webview, local CLI scripts, MCP clients on the same machine) keep working. Remote callers now have to send the audio over the wire if they want it transcribed. * fix: PR review nits — response shape, landing copy, form reset - /llm/generate's "model is downloading" branch was raising HTTPException(202, detail={...}), which wraps the payload in {"detail": ...} and forces clients to parse a success status as if it were an error. Switched to JSONResponse so the payload sits at the top level. - The landing page's "Language Models" card advertised "Qwen 3.5" with sizes 4B/2B/0.8B; we ship Qwen3 at 0.6B/1.7B/4B. Aligned to what's actually in the binary. - ProfileForm's discard-draft button reset the form without touching `personality` or `avatarFile`, so stale persona text and an attached avatar would survive the discard. The other three resets in the file already include both fields — this brings the discard path in line. * perf(mcp): move last_seen_at stamp off the request path ClientIdMiddleware was running the SQLAlchemy SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE/COMMIT inline on the event loop after every /mcp/* and /speak request. SQLite serialises writes, so concurrent MCP traffic queued behind the stamp write — the response sat waiting on a side-effect that the client never needs in band, and SSE streams would stall briefly per request. The middleware now hands the stamp to asyncio.to_thread via a fire-and- forget create_task so the response returns immediately and the write runs on the default executor. A module-level set keeps strong refs to in-flight tasks (per asyncio docs) so the GC can't collect them mid- write. The fallback path runs the stamp inline if no loop is available (tests/oddball callers) rather than silently dropping it. * fix(dictate): force-dismiss the speaking pill when SSE never comes back The pill subscribed to /generation/{id}/status to know when to start playback, but EventSource.onerror was a no-op — auto-reconnect was the intended recovery for transient drops. The gap: if the backend deletes the gen row mid-flight or the connection silently dies in a way the browser keeps retrying without ever getting a status event, the pill sits in 'speaking' forever and the user has no way to clear it. Added a 60-second hard cap that arms when the SSE opens and clears the moment any real status event lands. If it fires while the pill is still on the same id and audio never started, it force-dismisses. Same idea as the existing post-speak-end 15s grace, but covers the case where the backend never says anything at all. * fix: i18n cleanup + readiness checklist effect cadence + ChordPicker shadow - DictationReadinessChecklist was constructing downloadByModel as a fresh Map every render and listing it in the cleanup effect's deps. With the 1 s polling cadence and arbitrary parent rerenders the effect ran more often than it needed to. Memoised the Map on activeTasks; the effect now keys off the memo's identity. - zh-CN persona tooltipActive/ariaLabelActive matched their inactive twins byte-for-byte ("以人物设定朗读"). The other locales differentiate the active state with a -ing / -中 suffix; zh-CN now reads "正以人物设定朗读" when active. - personalityPlaceholder was a ~290-character paragraph that doubled as both the example text and the explanation, repeating most of what personalityHint already said. Trimmed to the example only and folded the explanation + leave-blank consequence into the hint, across all four locales. - Refinement model size keys were size06 / size17 / size4. Renamed the 4B variant to size40 so the decimal padding is consistent. - ChordPicker's open-effect bound a window.setTimeout id to a local `t`, shadowing the i18n `t` from useTranslation. Renamed to timeoutId. * perf(settings): persist generation sliders on release, not per pointer-move Both sliders on the generation settings page were calling update() — which is a React Query mutation that PATCHes /settings/generation — inside onValueChange. Dragging the chunk-limit slider from 800 to 3000 fired a request per pointer-move pixel, and a mid-drag failure plus optimistic rollback would leave persisted state visibly out of sync with the thumb position. Local state now mirrors each slider during a drag and the persist happens once on Radix's onValueCommit (pointer-up / keyboard-release). useEffects keep the local state in sync if the persisted value changes out-of-band — another window editing the same setting still updates the slider position cleanly. * chore(backend): Ruff lint pass — deprecated APIs, exception leaks, dead patterns Mechanical sweep of items called out in the PR review: - qwen_llm_backend: AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(torch_dtype=…) is deprecated in transformers ≥4.41 in favor of dtype=. Renamed. - routes/llm: try/except around backend.generate() raised HTTPException(500, detail=str(e)) which leaks stack traces / paths to clients and trips Ruff B904. Now logs the original exception server-side and hands the client a generic message; chained via `from e` to preserve traceback context. - mcp_bindings + mcp_server/context: datetime.utcnow() is deprecated since 3.12. Switched the two assignment sites to datetime.now(timezone.utc). The schema-level `default=datetime.utcnow` defaults in database/models.py are left for a later schema-aware pass. - routes/generations: `logger = …` sat between two import blocks (Ruff E402). Moved below imports. - mcp_server/server + tests/test_refinement_samples: typing.Callable / typing.Iterable have been preferred-via collections.abc since 3.9 (Ruff UP035). - routes/events: `except asyncio.TimeoutError` aliases plain `TimeoutError` since 3.11 (UP041). - services/captures: hoisted WHISPER_NATIVE_FORMATS to module scope (was a function-local UPPER_SNAKE that tripped N806) and replaced the raw_path.unlink try/except OSError-pass with contextlib.suppress (SIM105). Semantic equivalence preserved — written_files.remove(raw_path) still only runs when unlink succeeds because it sits inside the suppressed block after the unlink call. - database/migrations: hoisted the duplicate `import sqlite3` from inside two helper bodies to a single module-level import. * feat(stories): regenerate action on clips and the chat list dropdown The track editor's clip toolbar now has a regenerate icon next to Delete; clicking it kicks a fresh take of the selected clip's underlying generation through the same /generate/{id}/regenerate path the History table uses, and pushes the id into the global pending set so the SSE watcher picks it up. The chat list's per-item dropdown gets the same action between Play-from-here and Remove. Translation keys added under storyContent.itemActions / storyContent.toast across all four locales. * feat(stories): import external audio into the timeline (drag-drop + picker) You can now drop a music file onto the story content area or pick one through the new "Import audio" button in the add-clip popover. Both call POST /generate/import which writes the file to data/generations/<id>.<ext>, probes duration via librosa, and inserts a Generation row pointing at a singleton "Imported Audio" profile (created lazily on first import). The existing addStoryItem flow takes over from there — the timeline doesn't care that the row didn't come out of TTS. Engine field on the row is "import"; it's surfaced on StoryItemDetail so the chat list shows a music icon instead of the (missing) profile avatar and both the dropdown and the track-editor toolbar hide the Regenerate action — there's nothing to regenerate. Accepted formats: wav/mp3/flac/ogg/m4a/aac/webm, capped at 200 MB. Translation keys added across en/ja/zh-CN/zh-TW. * fix(audio): serve real Content-Type so imports decode in WaveSurfer /audio/{id} and /audio/version/{id} hardcoded media_type="audio/wav" on the FileResponse. That was a no-op when every generation came out of TTS (everything on disk was a .wav anyway), but imported audio keeps its source format — .mp3 / .m4a / .ogg — and the WaveSurfer MediaElement backend uses an <audio> tag that checks Content-Type before letting the clip play, so an MP3 announced as audio/wav silently failed to load. Both endpoints now derive the type via mimetypes.guess_type and fall back to audio/wav for unknown suffixes. Download filenames also keep the real extension instead of always saying ".wav". * feat(stories): zoom bar bounds tracked to project length, default 60s scope The track editor's zoom was clamped to a hardcoded [10, 200] pixels-per-second range, which had no relationship to the project — on a 4-minute story a "max zoom out" of 200 px/s still required scrolling, and on a 5-second story you could zoom all the way in to where every clip was a tiny sliver. Reframed the bounds in the unit the user actually thinks in: how many seconds of timeline are visible at once. Min scope is 10 s (most zoomed in), max scope is the entire project, and the default lands on a 60 s scope (or the full project, whichever is shorter) once the editor measures its visible track width on first mount. The pixels-per-second value still lives in component state (because every downstream calculation already uses it) but minPps/maxPps are computed from `containerWidth − LABEL_COL_WIDTH` and the project's effective duration, so the +/- buttons and the edge-drag handles on the scrollbar all clamp to bounds that move with the project. Re-clamping fires whenever those bounds shift — adding a long clip or resizing the window pulls the current zoom inside the new range instead of leaving the user parked outside it. * fix(stories): show the source filename on imported clips Imports were rendering as "Imported Audio" everywhere because every import points at the singleton voice profile. The filename was already being stored on the generation row (in the `text` field), so the chat item title and the timeline clip label now read from `text` when `engine === 'import'` and fall back to the profile name otherwise. The chat item also drops the language pill (always "en" on imports — not informative) and skips the transcript textarea since imports have no spoken text to show. * fix(stories): round split_time_ms before posting handleSplit was sending currentTimeMs - item.start_time_ms straight to the backend, which rejects it because StoryItemSplit.split_time_ms is typed as int and the playhead's currentTimeMs is a float (it's driven from HTMLAudioElement.currentTime, which carries sub-millisecond precision). Pydantic surfaced the mismatch as "Input should be a valid integer, got a number with a fractional part" and the toast read "Failed to split clip". Math.round at the call site, matching what the trim and move handlers already do. * feat(stories): per-clip volume control on the timeline Each story item now carries a volume column (linear gain, default 1.0, clamped 0.0–2.0 server-side). New PUT /stories/{}/items/{}/volume route + useUpdateStoryItemVolume hook + a Volume2 icon in the clip-edit toolbar that opens a popover with a 0–200% slider. Local slider state drives the visual during a drag; the persist fires once on onValueCommit, mirroring the generation-page slider pattern. Web Audio playback inserts a per-clip GainNode between source and master so volume changes apply live without re-decoding the buffer (source -> clipGain -> masterGain -> destination). Server-side mixdown in export multiplies the trimmed clip by its volume before summing into the timeline. Split + duplicate carry the volume forward to the new clips so trimming a faded section keeps the level you set. Migration adds the volume column with default 1.0 so existing rows read as full volume. * fix(stories): mute the clip waveform's media element so it can't bleed audio The clip waveforms drawn inside each timeline track use WaveSurfer with the default MediaElement backend, which creates an internal <audio> element to drive playback timing. Web Audio in useStoryPlayback is what actually produces sound, but WaveSurfer's element was happily preloading and — after the first user gesture unlocked browser autoplay — playing the source URL through the page output too. For TTS clips it was masked: they're short, both sources start at the same time, and stopping the BufferSourceNode at pause coincides with the natural end of the audio element. For long imports (a four-minute MP3) the BufferSourceNode stops on pause but WaveSurfer's element keeps going on its own track — which is exactly the "music keeps playing when I pause" symptom. Hand WaveSurfer a muted <audio> element via the `media` option so the visual still loads peaks but the element itself can never produce sound. preload="metadata" keeps the load lightweight. * fix(stories): hard-cut the audio graph on stop so long imports actually halt source.stop() was the only thing happening when a clip was halted, and on long imported buffers (multi-minute MP3s scheduled via source.start with a duration argument) it was silently failing to halt the buffer in some browsers — pause left the music playing and seek stacked another source on top of the original. The mute-the-WaveSurfer-element fix was a different bug along the same path; this is the one that actually addresses the duplicated audio. ActiveSource now carries the per-clip GainNode alongside the source, and stopSource detaches the onended handler before calling stop() (so the natural-end callback can't race with explicit teardown and re-delete a freshly rescheduled entry at the same id), then disconnects both nodes inside their own try/catch blocks. Even when stop() doesn't actually halt the buffer the graph is severed — no path from source to destination, no audio. * feat(stories): add empty tracks above/below the timeline Tiny + strips sit at the top of the topmost label cell and the bottom of the bottommost one, sticky-positioned in the label column so they follow horizontal scroll. Clicking either extends the visible track stack in that direction by one — above adds max(existing)+1, below adds min(existing)-1. Both compute against the full set (defaults + item-derived + previously-added) so successive clicks keep extending instead of fighting over the same number. Empty extras live in component state because a track only earns its keep once a clip lands on it. Once one does, item.track carries the number forward and the row keeps deriving from items naturally; if nothing lands there before reload, the empty row simply isn't there next time, which matches what the user expects of an unused affordance. * fix(mcp): bundle stdio shim sidecar * fix(captures): allow dictation without paste permission * fix(mcp): preserve speak engine defaults * fix(captures): use platform hotkey defaults * fix(mcp): preload speak pill window * fix(captures): hide unwired storage settings * feat(sponsors): add /sponsors page, homepage promo, and in-app strip * style(landing): drop pill chrome from /download maintainer kicker * changelog * better naming for sponsors * windows keybind note --------- Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]>
This commit is contained in:
Jamie Pine
co-authored by
Claude Opus 4.7
Claude Opus 4.7
parent
627d40b42d
commit
7df366d0c8
+25
-16
@@ -1,23 +1,30 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "Voicebox Documentation"
|
||||
description: "Voicebox is a local-first voice cloning studio -- a free and open-source alternative to ElevenLabs."
|
||||
description: "Voicebox is the open-source, local-first AI voice studio — a free alternative to ElevenLabs and WisprFlow, running entirely on your machine."
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Voicebox is a **local-first voice cloning studio** -- a free and open-source alternative to ElevenLabs. Clone voices from a few seconds of audio, generate speech in 23 languages across 7 TTS engines, apply post-processing effects, and compose multi-voice projects with a timeline editor.
|
||||
Voicebox is the **open-source, local-first AI voice studio** — a free
|
||||
alternative to ElevenLabs and WisprFlow in one app. Clone voices, generate
|
||||
speech across 7 TTS engines, dictate into any app with a global hotkey,
|
||||
compose multi-voice projects, and let any MCP-aware agent speak in a voice
|
||||
you own. Everything runs on your hardware.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
- **Complete privacy** -- models and voice data stay on your machine
|
||||
- **7 TTS engines** -- Qwen3-TTS, Qwen CustomVoice, LuxTTS, Chatterbox Multilingual, Chatterbox Turbo, HumeAI TADA, and Kokoro
|
||||
- **Cloning and preset voices** -- zero-shot cloning from a reference sample, or 50+ curated preset voices via Kokoro and Qwen CustomVoice
|
||||
- **23 languages** -- from English to Arabic, Japanese, Hindi, Swahili, and more
|
||||
- **Post-processing effects** -- pitch shift, reverb, delay, chorus, compression, and filters
|
||||
- **Expressive speech** -- paralinguistic tags like `[laugh]`, `[sigh]`, `[gasp]` via Chatterbox Turbo; natural-language delivery control via Qwen CustomVoice
|
||||
- **Unlimited length** -- auto-chunking with crossfade for scripts, articles, and chapters
|
||||
- **Stories editor** -- multi-track timeline for conversations, podcasts, and narratives
|
||||
- **API-first** -- REST API for integrating voice synthesis into your own projects
|
||||
- **Native performance** -- built with Tauri (Rust), not Electron
|
||||
- **Runs everywhere** -- macOS (MLX/Metal), Windows (CUDA), Linux, AMD ROCm, Intel Arc, Docker
|
||||
- **Dictation** — hold a chord anywhere on your machine, speak, release; the transcript pastes into the focused field
|
||||
- **Captures tab** — paired audio + transcript archive, retranscribe / refine / play-as-voice
|
||||
- **Voice personalities** — per-profile compose button + persona-rewrite toggle, powered by a local LLM
|
||||
- **Agents speak back** — any MCP-aware agent can call Voicebox to speak in one of your cloned voices
|
||||
- **7 TTS engines** — Qwen3-TTS, Qwen CustomVoice, LuxTTS, Chatterbox Multilingual, Chatterbox Turbo, HumeAI TADA, Kokoro
|
||||
- **Cloning and preset voices** — zero-shot cloning or 50+ curated preset voices
|
||||
- **23 languages** — from English to Arabic, Japanese, Hindi, Swahili
|
||||
- **Post-processing effects** — pitch shift, reverb, delay, chorus, compression, filters
|
||||
- **Expressive speech** — paralinguistic tags (`[laugh]`, `[sigh]`) and natural-language delivery control
|
||||
- **Unlimited length** — auto-chunking with crossfade for long scripts
|
||||
- **Stories editor** — multi-track timeline for conversations, podcasts, narratives
|
||||
- **API-first** — REST + WebSocket API, MCP server for agent integrations
|
||||
- **Complete privacy** — models, audio, transcripts, LLM output never leave your machine
|
||||
- **Runs everywhere** — macOS (MLX/Metal), Windows (CUDA / DirectML), Linux (ROCm / CPU), Intel Arc, Docker
|
||||
|
||||
## Download
|
||||
|
||||
@@ -32,6 +39,8 @@ Voicebox is a **local-first voice cloning studio** -- a free and open-source alt
|
||||
|
||||
## Get Started
|
||||
|
||||
- [Installation](/overview/installation) -- download and install Voicebox
|
||||
- [Quick Start](/overview/quick-start) -- get up and running in 5 minutes
|
||||
- [API Reference](/api-reference) -- integrate voice synthesis into your apps
|
||||
- [Installation](/overview/installation) — download and install Voicebox
|
||||
- [Quick Start](/overview/quick-start) — get up and running in 5 minutes
|
||||
- [Dictation](/overview/dictation) — start talking to your computer
|
||||
- [Voice Personalities](/overview/voice-personalities) — compose and rewrite in any profile
|
||||
- [API Reference](/api-reference) — integrate voice synthesis into your apps
|
||||
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,189 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "Captures"
|
||||
description: "The paired audio + transcript archive — every dictation, recording, and uploaded audio file shows up here, replayable and retranscribable."
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Overview
|
||||
|
||||
A **capture** is an audio clip paired with its transcript. The Captures tab
|
||||
is where every dictation, manual recording, and uploaded audio file lands,
|
||||
with the original audio kept alongside the text so you can replay, re-run
|
||||
transcription with a different model, refine the transcript, or send the
|
||||
content somewhere else — including generating it back as speech in any of
|
||||
your voice profiles.
|
||||
|
||||
<Callout type="info">
|
||||
The Captures tab shipped in **0.5.0**, alongside global dictation and the
|
||||
per-profile personality modes. If you've used earlier versions, note that
|
||||
the Audio tab moved into **Settings → Audio Channels** to make room for
|
||||
this one.
|
||||
</Callout>
|
||||
|
||||
## Where captures come from
|
||||
|
||||
| Source | How it shows up | Badge |
|
||||
|---|---|---|
|
||||
| **Dictation** | Triggered by the global hotkey (see [Dictation](/overview/dictation)). Auto-refined by default. | `dictation` |
|
||||
| **In-app recording** | Recorded directly in the Captures tab using the built-in mic. | `recording` |
|
||||
| **File upload** | Any audio file dropped into the Captures tab — `.wav`, `.mp3`, `.m4a`, `.webm`, `.opus`, `.flac`. | `file` |
|
||||
|
||||
All three paths share the same backend pipeline, the same model picker, and
|
||||
the same refinement flags. The source badge is there so you can visually
|
||||
scan a long list.
|
||||
|
||||
## List view
|
||||
|
||||
The main Captures view is a chronological list. Each row shows:
|
||||
|
||||
- The transcript (raw or refined — the refined version wins if present)
|
||||
- Duration + timestamp
|
||||
- Source badge
|
||||
- A play button for the original audio
|
||||
- A meatballs menu with per-row actions
|
||||
|
||||
Filtering and search are a Tier-2 ask — ping if you need them.
|
||||
|
||||
## Detail view
|
||||
|
||||
Clicking into a capture opens the detail view:
|
||||
|
||||
- **Waveform player** for the original audio
|
||||
- **Transcript editor** — click in and edit. Changes save on blur.
|
||||
- **Refined vs. raw toggle** if refinement ran on this capture
|
||||
- **Per-capture action bar** — retranscribe, refine, play as voice, delete
|
||||
- **Settings snapshot** — STT model used, refinement flags at the time
|
||||
this capture was processed, and the voice model if any was played
|
||||
|
||||
## Retranscribe
|
||||
|
||||
Runs the capture's original audio through a different Whisper model without
|
||||
re-uploading or re-refining anything. Useful when:
|
||||
|
||||
- The default model mis-heard something and you want to try a larger model
|
||||
- You used Base for a noisy clip and want to rerun with Turbo
|
||||
- A non-English clip needs an explicit language hint
|
||||
|
||||
**Settings → Captures → Transcription** controls the default model and
|
||||
language lock for new captures. Retranscribe uses those defaults unless you
|
||||
override them per capture.
|
||||
|
||||
## Refine
|
||||
|
||||
Runs the raw transcript through the local LLM to produce a cleaned-up
|
||||
version. The flags on the capture are snapshotted when refinement first
|
||||
runs, so you can re-refine later with different flags without losing the raw
|
||||
transcript:
|
||||
|
||||
| Flag | Effect |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| **Smart cleanup** | Remove fillers (`um`, `uh`, `like`), tidy punctuation and capitalization. |
|
||||
| **Remove self-corrections** | Keep the final version when the speaker backtracks ("actually, no, on Tuesday"). |
|
||||
| **Preserve technical terms** | Leave identifiers (`handleSubmit`, `npm install`) untouched. |
|
||||
|
||||
See the Refinement section of [Dictation](/overview/dictation#refinement) for
|
||||
how Voicebox strips Whisper loop hallucinations *before* the LLM sees the
|
||||
transcript — a capture can be re-refined any number of times without
|
||||
re-introducing "thanks for watching thanks for watching" echoes.
|
||||
|
||||
The refinement model picker (three bundled Qwen3 sizes) lives in
|
||||
**Settings → Captures → Refinement**.
|
||||
|
||||
## Play as voice
|
||||
|
||||
This is the capability no one else in the dictation category ships: take any
|
||||
capture and play it back as speech in any of your voice profiles. One
|
||||
dropdown over every profile, one click, and the capture's text runs through
|
||||
`/generate` with the selected voice.
|
||||
|
||||
Use cases:
|
||||
|
||||
- Hear your own dictation back in a cloned voice of someone you like
|
||||
- Send a message you dictated as an audio reply in a specific character
|
||||
- Quickly prototype a line for a story without retyping
|
||||
|
||||
Playback uses whatever engine the selected profile is bound to — the same
|
||||
rules as the Generate tab. There's no LLM in this path; the transcript goes
|
||||
through unchanged. If you want the agent-style "transform the content before
|
||||
speaking" flow, that's what the
|
||||
[personality modes](/overview/voice-personalities) do — and the same
|
||||
primitive is exposed to MCP-aware agents via the
|
||||
[MCP Server](/overview/mcp-server) so Claude Code, Cursor, or Cline can speak
|
||||
in one of your voices on their own.
|
||||
|
||||
<Callout type="info">
|
||||
The default voice for the Captures tab's Play-as action is set in
|
||||
**Settings → Captures → Playback → Default voice**. You can still override
|
||||
it per capture.
|
||||
</Callout>
|
||||
|
||||
## Send-to menu
|
||||
|
||||
Each capture has a Send-to menu for moving its content into other parts of
|
||||
Voicebox:
|
||||
|
||||
- **Copy transcript** — to clipboard
|
||||
- **Use as voice sample…** — promote this capture to a sample on a voice
|
||||
profile of your choice. Opens a profile picker (with "+ New voice" for
|
||||
cold starts) and a reference-text confirm dialog, because cloning needs
|
||||
the `reference_text` to match the audio verbatim. Edit as needed and
|
||||
save — the capture stays in the Captures tab untouched; the sample is a
|
||||
copy, not a move.
|
||||
|
||||
## Storage
|
||||
|
||||
The original audio is kept alongside the transcript in your Voicebox data
|
||||
directory. **Settings → Captures → Storage** shows the captures folder and can
|
||||
open it directly in your file manager.
|
||||
|
||||
Every capture's audio file and metadata row can be re-processed (retranscribe,
|
||||
refine, Play-as) as long as the audio file still exists.
|
||||
|
||||
## Short-recording guard
|
||||
|
||||
Audio clips under **300 ms** are short-circuited client-side and never
|
||||
uploaded. This prevents a fumbled chord tap from landing an empty capture.
|
||||
The threshold is tuned to filter accidents without cutting off intentional
|
||||
short dictations.
|
||||
|
||||
## Keyboard shortcuts
|
||||
|
||||
Inside the Captures tab:
|
||||
|
||||
| Keys | Action |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| `Space` | Play / pause the selected capture |
|
||||
| `↑` / `↓` | Previous / next capture in the list |
|
||||
| `Enter` | Open the selected capture in detail view |
|
||||
| `⌘ / Ctrl` + `C` (in detail view) | Copy the transcript |
|
||||
|
||||
## API surface
|
||||
|
||||
The Captures tab is backed by a small set of REST endpoints:
|
||||
|
||||
| Method | Endpoint | Use |
|
||||
|---|---|---|
|
||||
| `POST` | `/captures` | Upload audio + start the pipeline (STT, optional refinement, archival). |
|
||||
| `GET` | `/captures` | List captures. |
|
||||
| `GET` | `/captures/{id}` | Fetch one capture. |
|
||||
| `POST` | `/captures/{id}/retranscribe` | Rerun STT with a chosen model. |
|
||||
| `POST` | `/captures/{id}/refine` | Rerun refinement with chosen flags. |
|
||||
| `POST` | `/profiles/{id}/samples/from-capture/{capture_id}` | Promote a capture to a voice profile sample. |
|
||||
|
||||
These endpoints are stable and usable from your own scripts — see
|
||||
[Remote Mode](/overview/remote-mode) for running Voicebox as a server the rest
|
||||
of your machine can talk to.
|
||||
|
||||
## Next steps
|
||||
|
||||
<Cards>
|
||||
<Card title="Dictation" href="/overview/dictation">
|
||||
The global hotkey flow that feeds most captures.
|
||||
</Card>
|
||||
<Card title="Voice Personalities" href="/overview/voice-personalities">
|
||||
Per-profile compose button and persona rewrite toggle for captures you
|
||||
want to transform, not just transcribe.
|
||||
</Card>
|
||||
<Card title="Creating Voice Profiles" href="/overview/creating-voice-profiles">
|
||||
Promote a capture into a voice sample on a profile.
|
||||
</Card>
|
||||
</Cards>
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,208 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "Dictation"
|
||||
description: "Hold a key anywhere on your machine, speak, release — the transcript lands in whatever text field you had focused."
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Overview
|
||||
|
||||
Dictation lets you turn speech into clean text anywhere on your computer. Hold
|
||||
a chord, talk, release — Voicebox transcribes what you said with Whisper,
|
||||
optionally cleans it up with a local LLM, and pastes the result into the text
|
||||
field you had focused when you started.
|
||||
|
||||
Everything happens on your hardware. No cloud, no accounts, no audio leaving
|
||||
the machine.
|
||||
|
||||
<Callout type="info">
|
||||
Dictation was introduced in **0.5.0** alongside the Captures tab and the
|
||||
per-profile personality modes. It's the "input" half of Voicebox's voice I/O
|
||||
loop — cloning and TTS are still the "output" half.
|
||||
</Callout>
|
||||
|
||||
## The flow
|
||||
|
||||
<Steps>
|
||||
<Step title="Hold the chord">
|
||||
Hold the push-to-talk chord anywhere on your machine. A small pill fades
|
||||
in over your current app.
|
||||
</Step>
|
||||
<Step title="Speak">
|
||||
The pill shows `Recording` with a live waveform and an elapsed-time
|
||||
counter. Speak naturally — you don't have to wait for anything.
|
||||
</Step>
|
||||
<Step title="Release">
|
||||
On release, the pill flips to `Transcribing`, then `Refining` if
|
||||
auto-refine is on, then disappears.
|
||||
</Step>
|
||||
<Step title="Text lands in your app">
|
||||
If auto-paste is enabled and Voicebox has Accessibility permission, the
|
||||
transcript pastes into the text field you had focused when you started
|
||||
talking — not wherever focus drifted while you were speaking.
|
||||
</Step>
|
||||
</Steps>
|
||||
|
||||
Either way, every capture also appears in the **Captures tab** with the
|
||||
original audio and the transcript paired together. See
|
||||
[Captures](/overview/captures) for what you can do with them after the fact.
|
||||
|
||||
## Push-to-talk and toggle modes
|
||||
|
||||
Voicebox ships two chord behaviors out of the box:
|
||||
|
||||
| Mode | Default (macOS) | Default (Windows) | Behavior |
|
||||
|---|---|---|---|
|
||||
| **Push-to-talk** | Right `⌘` + Right `⌥` | Right `Ctrl` + Right `Shift` | Recording stops when you release the chord. |
|
||||
| **Toggle-to-talk** | Push-to-talk + `Space` | Push-to-talk + `Space` | Recording keeps going until you tap the chord again. |
|
||||
|
||||
**Holding PTT and tapping `Space` mid-hold upgrades a hold into a toggled
|
||||
session** without a gap in the audio. This is the single most useful detail of
|
||||
the chord system — short bursts feel fast, long-form narration feels
|
||||
hands-free, and there's no decision up front about which mode you wanted.
|
||||
|
||||
## The on-screen pill
|
||||
|
||||
While you're dictating, a floating pill appears over the current app. It walks
|
||||
through the states of the capture cycle and shows live signals for each:
|
||||
|
||||
| State | What it shows |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| `Recording` | Live waveform + elapsed time. |
|
||||
| `Transcribing` | Thinking waveform while Whisper runs. |
|
||||
| `Refining` | Same thinking waveform while the LLM cleans up the transcript (only if auto-refine is on). |
|
||||
| Error | Red tint. Click the pill to copy the error to your clipboard. Auto-dismisses. |
|
||||
|
||||
The pill is transparent, always-on-top, and pre-created hidden at app start —
|
||||
so it appears instantly when you hit the chord, with no window flash.
|
||||
|
||||
## Customizing the chord
|
||||
|
||||
Open **Settings → Captures → Dictation** to change either chord.
|
||||
|
||||
- **Left vs right modifier badges.** When you hold keys into the chord
|
||||
picker, Voicebox records whether each modifier is the left or right variant.
|
||||
That means you can bind to just the right `⌥` while leaving the left `⌥`
|
||||
alone — useful if you want dictation on one hand and keep your
|
||||
other-hand shortcuts intact.
|
||||
- **Chord defaults are picked to stay out of your way.** On macOS, the
|
||||
defaults deliberately avoid left-hand `Cmd+Option` chords so
|
||||
`Cmd+Option+I` (devtools), `Cmd+Option+Esc` (force quit), and
|
||||
`Cmd+Option+Space` (Spotlight) all remain yours. On Windows, the defaults
|
||||
route around AltGr collisions on German / French / Spanish layouts where
|
||||
`Ctrl+Alt` synthesizes AltGr.
|
||||
- **Live reload.** Changing a chord in Settings takes effect immediately —
|
||||
no restart, no tab reload.
|
||||
|
||||
## Auto-paste into the focused app
|
||||
|
||||
Once transcription finishes, Voicebox can synthesize a native paste into
|
||||
whatever text field had focus when you started the chord. Your clipboard is
|
||||
saved before and restored after, so nothing you had copied goes missing.
|
||||
|
||||
| Platform | Mechanism |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| macOS | `CGEventPost` at the HID tap with a full `⌘V` key sequence, preceded by reactivating the original app via `NSRunningApplication`. |
|
||||
| Windows | `SendInput` with correct scan codes, plus a `SetForegroundWindow` + `AttachThreadInput` handshake to defeat foreground-lock when pasting into a window that wasn't frontmost at chord-start. |
|
||||
|
||||
**Focus is snapshotted at chord-start.** The paste targets the original field
|
||||
even if focus drifts during transcribe / refine — that's the "pastes where you
|
||||
were talking *from*, not where you're looking *now*" behavior.
|
||||
|
||||
<Callout type="info">
|
||||
Auto-paste is optional. If Accessibility permission isn't granted (macOS),
|
||||
or you prefer to keep synthetic input off, dictation still runs — transcripts
|
||||
land in the Captures tab and you can copy them manually. The setting lives
|
||||
inline next to the Accessibility prompt in Settings → Captures → Dictation,
|
||||
not as a global banner.
|
||||
</Callout>
|
||||
|
||||
## Refinement
|
||||
|
||||
If auto-refine is on, a local LLM cleans up the raw Whisper transcript
|
||||
before it's pasted. The goal is to remove verbal clutter without rewriting
|
||||
what you actually said.
|
||||
|
||||
What refinement typically fixes:
|
||||
|
||||
- Filler words (`um`, `uh`, `like` used as pauses, `you know`)
|
||||
- Self-corrections — the LLM keeps the final version and drops earlier
|
||||
attempts (`could you uh run the migration real quick, and then, yeah,
|
||||
check the logs` → `Could you run the migration, then check the logs?`)
|
||||
- Basic punctuation and capitalization
|
||||
- Whisper loop hallucinations — Voicebox strips repeated tokens (six or
|
||||
more identical tokens in a row, case-insensitive) *before* the LLM
|
||||
sees the transcript, so a small refinement model can't echo them back
|
||||
|
||||
What refinement deliberately preserves:
|
||||
|
||||
- Technical terms and code identifiers (`npm install`, `handleSubmit`)
|
||||
- Legitimate repetition (`no, no, no, no, no` has fewer than six identical
|
||||
tokens, so it survives)
|
||||
- Your intent — refinement is cleanup, not rewriting
|
||||
|
||||
Flags are snapshotted per capture, so you can re-refine the same raw
|
||||
transcript later with different flags without losing the original. The
|
||||
refinement model picker (**Settings → Captures → Refinement**) offers three
|
||||
bundled Qwen3 sizes:
|
||||
|
||||
| Model | Size | Best for |
|
||||
|---|---|---|
|
||||
| Qwen3 0.6B | ~400 MB | Default. Very fast, good for casual dictation. |
|
||||
| Qwen3 1.7B | ~1.1 GB | Sweet spot when transcripts contain code identifiers. |
|
||||
| Qwen3 4B | ~2.5 GB | Full quality, slowest. |
|
||||
|
||||
This is the same local LLM used by the per-profile personality modes — one
|
||||
LLM in the app, not two. See [Voice Personalities](/overview/voice-personalities).
|
||||
|
||||
## Platform notes
|
||||
|
||||
### macOS
|
||||
|
||||
- **Accessibility permission** is required for auto-paste. The prompt lives
|
||||
inline next to the toggle in **Settings → Captures → Dictation**, with a
|
||||
deep link to **System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility**.
|
||||
- **TSM crash mitigation.** The global hotkey listener runs on a background
|
||||
thread with `set_is_main_thread(false)` to sidestep a known
|
||||
macOS 14+ crash in the `rdev` library. If you hit an unexpected dictation
|
||||
failure on macOS, check the logs for TSM-related messages.
|
||||
|
||||
### Windows
|
||||
|
||||
- **UAC / UIPI caveat.** Synthetic paste into an *elevated* window from a
|
||||
non-elevated Voicebox is blocked by Windows itself. Run Voicebox elevated
|
||||
if you regularly dictate into elevated apps (e.g. an elevated terminal or
|
||||
Task Manager).
|
||||
- **Right-hand default chord** (`Ctrl+Shift`) avoids AltGr collisions on
|
||||
keyboard layouts where `Ctrl+Alt` is the compose key (German, French,
|
||||
Spanish, some others).
|
||||
|
||||
### Linux
|
||||
|
||||
- **Not yet in this release.** The Rust shim ships the macOS and Windows
|
||||
paths in 0.5.0. Linux `uinput` / AT-SPI support and the Wayland paste
|
||||
story are tracked in `docs/plans/VOICE_IO.md`.
|
||||
|
||||
## When auto-paste skips itself
|
||||
|
||||
A few cases where Voicebox deliberately does *not* synthesize a paste:
|
||||
|
||||
- **Focus was inside Voicebox** when the chord started. The transcript goes
|
||||
to the Captures tab so a dictation-into-Voicebox round-trip doesn't
|
||||
accidentally paste into the generate box.
|
||||
- **No text focus detected.** The transcript still lands in the Captures
|
||||
tab; copy it from there with one click.
|
||||
- **Accessibility permission not granted** on macOS. Same — Captures tab
|
||||
only.
|
||||
|
||||
## Next steps
|
||||
|
||||
<Cards>
|
||||
<Card title="Captures" href="/overview/captures">
|
||||
The paired audio + transcript archive every dictation lands in.
|
||||
</Card>
|
||||
<Card title="Voice Personalities" href="/overview/voice-personalities">
|
||||
The same local LLM powers per-profile compose and persona rewrite.
|
||||
</Card>
|
||||
<Card title="Transcription" href="/developer/transcription">
|
||||
Developer-level details on Whisper, Whisper Turbo, and the STT backend.
|
||||
</Card>
|
||||
</Cards>
|
||||
@@ -1,23 +1,48 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "Introduction"
|
||||
description: "Voicebox is a local-first voice cloning studio -- a free and open-source alternative to ElevenLabs."
|
||||
description: "Voicebox is the open-source, local-first AI voice studio — a free alternative to ElevenLabs and WisprFlow, running entirely on your machine."
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## What is Voicebox?
|
||||
|
||||
Voicebox is a **local-first voice cloning studio** -- a free and open-source alternative to ElevenLabs. Clone voices from a few seconds of audio or pick from 50+ preset voices, generate speech in 23 languages across 7 TTS engines, apply post-processing effects, and compose multi-voice projects with a timeline editor.
|
||||
Voicebox is the **open-source, local-first AI voice studio**. It closes the
|
||||
voice I/O loop in both directions on one machine, with no cloud and no
|
||||
accounts:
|
||||
|
||||
- **Complete privacy** -- models and voice data stay on your machine
|
||||
- **7 TTS engines** -- Qwen3-TTS, Qwen CustomVoice, LuxTTS, Chatterbox Multilingual, Chatterbox Turbo, HumeAI TADA, and Kokoro
|
||||
- **Cloning and preset voices** -- zero-shot cloning from a reference sample, or curated preset voices via Kokoro (50 voices) and Qwen CustomVoice (9 voices)
|
||||
- **23 languages** -- from English to Arabic, Japanese, Hindi, Swahili, and more
|
||||
- **Post-processing effects** -- pitch shift, reverb, delay, chorus, compression, and filters
|
||||
- **Expressive speech** -- paralinguistic tags like `[laugh]`, `[sigh]`, `[gasp]` via Chatterbox Turbo; natural-language delivery control via Qwen CustomVoice
|
||||
- **Unlimited length** -- auto-chunking with crossfade for scripts, articles, and chapters
|
||||
- **Stories editor** -- multi-track timeline for conversations, podcasts, and narratives
|
||||
- **API-first** -- REST API for integrating voice synthesis into your own projects
|
||||
- **Native performance** -- built with Tauri (Rust), not Electron
|
||||
- **Runs everywhere** -- macOS (MLX/Metal), Windows (CUDA), Linux, AMD ROCm, Intel Arc, Docker
|
||||
- **Humans talk** — hold a chord anywhere on your machine and your
|
||||
dictation lands as clean text in whatever text field you had focused
|
||||
- **Agents talk back** — any MCP-aware agent can call Voicebox to speak in
|
||||
one of your cloned voices
|
||||
- **Voices speak for themselves** — voice profiles can carry a personality
|
||||
that composes fresh lines or rewrites text before it's spoken
|
||||
|
||||
It's the free, local alternative to both ElevenLabs (voice cloning and TTS)
|
||||
and WisprFlow (voice dictation for agents and power users) — covering both
|
||||
sides of the same loop in one app, with a single model directory and LLM
|
||||
shared between input and output.
|
||||
|
||||
## What's in the app
|
||||
|
||||
- **Dictation** — global hotkey, push-to-talk and toggle modes, auto-paste
|
||||
into the focused field on macOS and Windows (see [Dictation](/overview/dictation))
|
||||
- **Captures tab** — paired audio + transcript archive, retranscribe,
|
||||
refine, play-as-voice, promote-to-sample (see [Captures](/overview/captures))
|
||||
- **Voice cloning** — 5 cloning engines covering 23 languages. Zero-shot
|
||||
cloning from a reference sample (see [Voice Cloning](/overview/voice-cloning))
|
||||
- **Preset voices** — 50+ curated voices via Kokoro and Qwen CustomVoice
|
||||
for when you don't want to clone (see [Preset Voices](/overview/preset-voices))
|
||||
- **Voice personalities** — optional free-form personality on any profile
|
||||
plus a compose button and persona-rewrite toggle powered by a local LLM (see
|
||||
[Voice Personalities](/overview/voice-personalities))
|
||||
- **Post-processing effects** — pitch shift, reverb, delay, chorus,
|
||||
compression, filters (Spotify's Pedalboard)
|
||||
- **Expressive speech** — paralinguistic tags like `[laugh]` and `[sigh]`
|
||||
via Chatterbox Turbo; natural-language delivery control via Qwen CustomVoice
|
||||
- **Unlimited length** — auto-chunking with crossfade for long scripts
|
||||
- **Stories editor** — multi-track timeline for conversations and podcasts
|
||||
- **API-first** — REST + WebSocket API; MCP server for agent integrations
|
||||
- **Runs everywhere** — macOS (MLX/Metal), Windows (CUDA / DirectML), Linux
|
||||
(ROCm / CPU), Intel Arc, Docker
|
||||
|
||||
## TTS Engines
|
||||
|
||||
@@ -30,9 +55,21 @@ Seven engines with different strengths, switchable per-generation:
|
||||
| **LuxTTS** | Cloned | English | Lightweight (~1GB VRAM), 48kHz output, 150x realtime on CPU |
|
||||
| **Chatterbox Multilingual** | Cloned | 23 | Broadest language coverage |
|
||||
| **Chatterbox Turbo** | Cloned | English | Fast 350M model with paralinguistic emotion/sound tags |
|
||||
| **TADA** (1B / 3B) | Cloned | 10 | HumeAI speech-language model -- 700s+ coherent audio |
|
||||
| **TADA** (1B / 3B) | Cloned | 10 | HumeAI speech-language model — 700s+ coherent audio |
|
||||
| **Kokoro** | Preset (50 voices) | 9 | 82M parameters, CPU realtime, lowest VRAM of any engine |
|
||||
|
||||
## STT and local LLM
|
||||
|
||||
Voicebox also runs a full speech recognition and local LLM stack, shared
|
||||
between dictation, the Captures tab, and per-profile personality modes:
|
||||
|
||||
| Layer | Models |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| **STT** | Whisper Base / Small / Medium / Large / Turbo (PyTorch or MLX) |
|
||||
| **LLM** | Qwen3 0.6B / 1.7B / 4B (refinement + per-profile compose / persona-rewrite) |
|
||||
|
||||
No cloud fallback, no bring-your-own-API-key. Local is the product.
|
||||
|
||||
## GPU Support
|
||||
|
||||
| Platform | Backend | Notes |
|
||||
@@ -46,11 +83,13 @@ Seven engines with different strengths, switchable per-generation:
|
||||
|
||||
## Use Cases
|
||||
|
||||
- **Game development** -- generate dynamic dialogue for characters
|
||||
- **Content creation** -- produce podcasts and video voiceovers
|
||||
- **Accessibility** -- build text-to-speech tools for users who need them
|
||||
- **Voice assistants** -- create custom voice interfaces
|
||||
- **Production pipelines** -- automate voiceover workflows via the REST API
|
||||
- **Dictation for humans and agents** — speak instead of type, in any app
|
||||
- **Agent voice output** — any MCP-aware agent can speak in a cloned voice
|
||||
- **Game development** — generate dynamic dialogue for characters
|
||||
- **Content creation** — podcasts, video voiceovers, audiobooks
|
||||
- **Accessibility** — speech-to-text for any field, TTS with a voice you own
|
||||
- **Voice assistants** — custom voice interfaces without a cloud bill
|
||||
- **Production pipelines** — automate voice workflows via the REST API
|
||||
|
||||
## Tech Stack
|
||||
|
||||
@@ -61,8 +100,9 @@ Seven engines with different strengths, switchable per-generation:
|
||||
| State | Zustand, React Query |
|
||||
| Backend | FastAPI (Python) |
|
||||
| TTS Engines | Qwen3-TTS, Qwen CustomVoice, LuxTTS, Chatterbox, Chatterbox Turbo, TADA, Kokoro |
|
||||
| STT | Whisper / Whisper Turbo (PyTorch or MLX) |
|
||||
| Local LLM | Qwen3 0.6B / 1.7B / 4B (MLX or PyTorch) |
|
||||
| Effects | Pedalboard (Spotify) |
|
||||
| Transcription | Whisper / Whisper Turbo (PyTorch or MLX) |
|
||||
| Inference | MLX (Apple Silicon) / PyTorch (CUDA/ROCm/XPU/CPU) |
|
||||
| Database | SQLite |
|
||||
| Audio | WaveSurfer.js, librosa |
|
||||
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,299 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "MCP Server"
|
||||
description: "Let Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, or any MCP-aware agent speak in one of your cloned voices — locally, with no cloud."
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Overview
|
||||
|
||||
Voicebox ships a built-in **Model Context Protocol** server so local AI
|
||||
agents can call your Voicebox install directly: speak text in a voice
|
||||
profile, transcribe audio, and list captures or profiles. The server runs
|
||||
inside the same process as the rest of Voicebox and is mounted at `/mcp`
|
||||
over Streamable HTTP.
|
||||
|
||||
Agent asks to speak → Voicebox plays audio on your speakers → an on-screen
|
||||
pill surfaces the voice name for the whole duration so you always see what's
|
||||
coming out of your machine.
|
||||
|
||||
<Callout type="info">
|
||||
MCP shipped in **0.5.0** alongside [Dictation](/overview/dictation) and
|
||||
[Voice Personalities](/overview/voice-personalities). The design goal is
|
||||
"local voice layer for every agent on your machine" — the same app that
|
||||
captures your voice can generate a response in any voice profile you've
|
||||
cloned.
|
||||
</Callout>
|
||||
|
||||
## Quick install
|
||||
|
||||
### Claude Code
|
||||
|
||||
```
|
||||
claude mcp add voicebox \
|
||||
--transport http \
|
||||
--url http://127.0.0.1:17493/mcp \
|
||||
--header "X-Voicebox-Client-Id: claude-code"
|
||||
```
|
||||
|
||||
### Cursor / Windsurf / VS Code MCP / any HTTP MCP client
|
||||
|
||||
Drop this into the client's MCP config (usually `.mcp.json` or a Settings UI):
|
||||
|
||||
```json
|
||||
{
|
||||
"mcpServers": {
|
||||
"voicebox": {
|
||||
"url": "http://127.0.0.1:17493/mcp",
|
||||
"headers": { "X-Voicebox-Client-Id": "cursor" }
|
||||
}
|
||||
}
|
||||
}
|
||||
```
|
||||
|
||||
Change `cursor` to whatever name you want the binding to show up as in
|
||||
Voicebox → Settings → MCP. The value is just an identifier for the
|
||||
per-client voice binding — not a secret, not a credential.
|
||||
|
||||
### Clients that only speak stdio
|
||||
|
||||
A stdio shim binary `voicebox-mcp` is bundled with the desktop app. Point
|
||||
the client at that binary's absolute path:
|
||||
|
||||
<Tabs items={["macOS", "Windows", "Linux"]}>
|
||||
<Tab value="macOS">
|
||||
```json
|
||||
{
|
||||
"mcpServers": {
|
||||
"voicebox": {
|
||||
"command": "/Applications/Voicebox.app/Contents/MacOS/voicebox-mcp",
|
||||
"env": { "VOICEBOX_CLIENT_ID": "claude-desktop" }
|
||||
}
|
||||
}
|
||||
}
|
||||
```
|
||||
</Tab>
|
||||
<Tab value="Windows">
|
||||
```json
|
||||
{
|
||||
"mcpServers": {
|
||||
"voicebox": {
|
||||
"command": "C:\\Program Files\\Voicebox\\voicebox-mcp.exe",
|
||||
"env": { "VOICEBOX_CLIENT_ID": "claude-desktop" }
|
||||
}
|
||||
}
|
||||
}
|
||||
```
|
||||
</Tab>
|
||||
<Tab value="Linux">
|
||||
```json
|
||||
{
|
||||
"mcpServers": {
|
||||
"voicebox": {
|
||||
"command": "/opt/voicebox/voicebox-mcp",
|
||||
"env": { "VOICEBOX_CLIENT_ID": "claude-desktop" }
|
||||
}
|
||||
}
|
||||
}
|
||||
```
|
||||
</Tab>
|
||||
</Tabs>
|
||||
|
||||
The shim waits up to 30 seconds for the Voicebox backend to come up, then
|
||||
proxies JSON-RPC from stdio over Streamable HTTP. Voicebox must be running
|
||||
for the shim to connect.
|
||||
|
||||
## Tools
|
||||
|
||||
| Tool | Use |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| `voicebox.speak` | Speak text in a voice profile. Returns a `generation_id` to poll. |
|
||||
| `voicebox.transcribe` | Whisper transcription of base64 audio or an absolute local path. |
|
||||
| `voicebox.list_captures` | Recent captures with transcripts, paginated. |
|
||||
| `voicebox.list_profiles` | Available voice profiles (cloned + preset). |
|
||||
|
||||
### `voicebox.speak`
|
||||
|
||||
```ts
|
||||
voicebox.speak({
|
||||
text: "Deploy complete.",
|
||||
profile?: "Morgan", // name or id; falls back to per-client binding, then default
|
||||
engine?: "qwen", // qwen | qwen_custom_voice | luxtts | chatterbox | chatterbox_turbo | tada | kokoro
|
||||
personality?: true, // rewrite via the profile's personality LLM before TTS; default comes from the per-client binding
|
||||
language?: "en",
|
||||
})
|
||||
```
|
||||
|
||||
Returns:
|
||||
|
||||
```json
|
||||
{
|
||||
"generation_id": "…",
|
||||
"status": "generating",
|
||||
"profile": "Morgan",
|
||||
"source": "mcp",
|
||||
"poll_url": "/generate/<id>/status"
|
||||
}
|
||||
```
|
||||
|
||||
- **Plain TTS** — `personality: false` (or omitted + binding default is false). Text is spoken as-is.
|
||||
- **Persona mode** — `personality: true` and the profile must have a personality prompt set.
|
||||
The LLM rewrites the text in character before TTS. See [Voice Personalities](/overview/voice-personalities).
|
||||
|
||||
### `voicebox.transcribe`
|
||||
|
||||
```ts
|
||||
voicebox.transcribe({
|
||||
audio_base64?: "<base64>", // exactly one of these two
|
||||
audio_path?: "/absolute/path/to/file.wav",
|
||||
language?: "en",
|
||||
model?: "turbo", // base | small | medium | large | turbo
|
||||
})
|
||||
```
|
||||
|
||||
Returns `{ text, duration, language, model }`. 200 MB ceiling on either path.
|
||||
|
||||
### `voicebox.list_captures`
|
||||
|
||||
`{ limit?: 20, offset?: 0 }` → `{ captures: [...], total }`. `limit` is
|
||||
clamped to `1..=200`.
|
||||
|
||||
### `voicebox.list_profiles`
|
||||
|
||||
No args → `{ profiles: [{ id, name, voice_type, language, has_personality }] }`.
|
||||
|
||||
## Voice resolution
|
||||
|
||||
Every call to `voicebox.speak` (and `POST /speak`) resolves the voice profile
|
||||
in this order:
|
||||
|
||||
<Steps>
|
||||
<Step title="Explicit `profile` arg">
|
||||
Passed as a name (case-insensitive) or id. If the name/id doesn't match,
|
||||
the call errors — the server doesn't silently fall back.
|
||||
</Step>
|
||||
<Step title="Per-client binding">
|
||||
Looked up by the `X-Voicebox-Client-Id` header. Managed in
|
||||
**Voicebox → Settings → MCP**. Lets you pin Claude Code to Morgan,
|
||||
Cursor to Scarlett, etc.
|
||||
</Step>
|
||||
<Step title="Global default">
|
||||
`capture_settings.default_playback_voice_id` — same default voice the
|
||||
Captures tab's "Play as voice" action uses.
|
||||
</Step>
|
||||
</Steps>
|
||||
|
||||
If none of the three produce a profile the tool returns a helpful error
|
||||
pointing at Settings.
|
||||
|
||||
## Per-client bindings
|
||||
|
||||
Voicebox → Settings → MCP shows one row per `client_id` Voicebox has heard
|
||||
from, plus the config snippets you can copy into each agent. Each row
|
||||
carries:
|
||||
|
||||
| Field | Purpose |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| `label` | Display name in the Settings UI (e.g. "Claude Code"). |
|
||||
| `profile_id` | The voice this client uses when `profile` isn't passed. |
|
||||
| `default_engine` | Override the TTS engine for this client. |
|
||||
| `default_personality` | When true, `voicebox.speak` routes through the profile's personality LLM (rewrite) by default. |
|
||||
| `last_seen_at` | Last time the server saw a request from this client. |
|
||||
|
||||
`last_seen_at` is stamped automatically by middleware on every `/mcp/*`
|
||||
request — useful when you're not sure whether your config took.
|
||||
|
||||
## The speaking pill
|
||||
|
||||
Every agent-initiated speak surfaces the floating pill the same way
|
||||
[Dictation](/overview/dictation) does, in a new `Speaking` state showing the
|
||||
profile name and an elapsed timer. The pill is intentionally unmissable —
|
||||
silent background TTS is a trust hazard, so Voicebox always shows what's
|
||||
being spoken and in what voice.
|
||||
|
||||
Behind the scenes, the backend broadcasts `speak-start` and `speak-end`
|
||||
events on `GET /events/speak`, which `DictateWindow` subscribes to via SSE.
|
||||
The pill overrides the capture session when both would render — you can't
|
||||
hear two pills at once.
|
||||
|
||||
## Non-MCP REST surface
|
||||
|
||||
`POST /speak` is a thin wrapper on the same code path for callers that
|
||||
don't speak MCP — shell scripts, ACP, A2A, GitHub Actions, whatever.
|
||||
|
||||
```bash
|
||||
curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:17493/speak \
|
||||
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
|
||||
-H 'X-Voicebox-Client-Id: ci' \
|
||||
-d '{"text":"Build complete.","profile":"Morgan"}'
|
||||
```
|
||||
|
||||
Body fields match the MCP tool: `text`, optional `profile`, `engine`,
|
||||
`personality`, `language`. Returns a `GenerationResponse` — the same shape as
|
||||
`POST /generate`.
|
||||
|
||||
## Debugging
|
||||
|
||||
Use the MCP Inspector to poke tools directly without plumbing through an
|
||||
agent:
|
||||
|
||||
```
|
||||
npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector http://127.0.0.1:17493/mcp
|
||||
```
|
||||
|
||||
Start with `voicebox.list_profiles` to confirm wiring, then
|
||||
`voicebox.speak` for end-to-end — you should hear audio and see the
|
||||
generation land in the Captures tab.
|
||||
|
||||
<Callout type="info">
|
||||
If an agent can't reach the server, the first thing to check is that
|
||||
Voicebox is running — the backend only listens while the desktop app is
|
||||
open. The stdio shim surfaces this as a JSON-RPC error on the client
|
||||
side after its 30-second health-wait window elapses.
|
||||
</Callout>
|
||||
|
||||
## Security
|
||||
|
||||
- **Localhost only.** The server binds to `127.0.0.1`. If you ever point
|
||||
Voicebox at a non-loopback interface (e.g. remote-mode over a trusted
|
||||
network), add a bearer token — it's on the roadmap but not in 0.5.0.
|
||||
- **No auth today.** Any process that can connect to your loopback can
|
||||
call MCP. That's the same trust boundary as the rest of Voicebox's REST
|
||||
API and is appropriate for a single-user local tool.
|
||||
- **`audio_path` reads are unrestricted** against the same trust
|
||||
boundary. If you're scripting against a shared host, prefer
|
||||
`audio_base64` so you don't have to think about path sandboxing.
|
||||
- **Voice cloning consent applies.** See [Voice Cloning](/overview/voice-cloning#limitations)
|
||||
— an agent being able to call `voicebox.speak` in someone's voice
|
||||
doesn't change the ethics of whose voices you clone.
|
||||
|
||||
## Implementation notes
|
||||
|
||||
- **Transport:** Streamable HTTP (Nov-2025 MCP spec, post-SSE). Claude
|
||||
Code, Cursor, Windsurf, and VS Code MCP extensions all support it.
|
||||
- **Package naming:** the backend package is `backend/mcp_server/`, not
|
||||
`mcp`, to avoid shadowing the PyPI `mcp` package FastMCP imports
|
||||
internally.
|
||||
- **Dependencies:** `fastmcp>=3.0,<4.0`, `sse-starlette>=2.0`.
|
||||
- **Lifespan:** mounting FastMCP requires the `lifespan=` kwarg on
|
||||
`FastAPI()` — the startup/shutdown event decorators are incompatible
|
||||
with FastMCP's Streamable HTTP session manager. The Voicebox app.py
|
||||
composes both into one async context manager.
|
||||
|
||||
For the full developer-facing tour of the code layout, see
|
||||
`backend/mcp_server/README.md` in the repo.
|
||||
|
||||
## Next steps
|
||||
|
||||
<Cards>
|
||||
<Card title="Voice Personalities" href="/overview/voice-personalities">
|
||||
Persona mode (`personality: true`) for agents that should
|
||||
transform text in-character before speaking.
|
||||
</Card>
|
||||
<Card title="Dictation" href="/overview/dictation">
|
||||
The pill that surfaces agent speech is the same one that surfaces
|
||||
your dictations — one mental model for both directions of the loop.
|
||||
</Card>
|
||||
<Card title="Captures" href="/overview/captures">
|
||||
Every agent-initiated speak lands in the Captures tab with its
|
||||
generated audio — replay, download, repurpose.
|
||||
</Card>
|
||||
</Cards>
|
||||
@@ -7,8 +7,12 @@
|
||||
"docker",
|
||||
"quick-start",
|
||||
"gpu-acceleration",
|
||||
"dictation",
|
||||
"captures",
|
||||
"voice-cloning",
|
||||
"preset-voices",
|
||||
"voice-personalities",
|
||||
"mcp-server",
|
||||
"stories-editor",
|
||||
"recording-transcription",
|
||||
"generation-history",
|
||||
|
||||
@@ -1,64 +1,106 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "Recording & Transcription"
|
||||
description: "Record audio and transcribe speech with Whisper"
|
||||
description: "A map of the three places you can record and transcribe audio in Voicebox — dictation, captures, and voice-profile samples."
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Recording
|
||||
## Overview
|
||||
|
||||
Voicebox includes built-in recording capabilities for creating voice samples and capturing audio.
|
||||
Voicebox records and transcribes audio in three different contexts, each
|
||||
feeding a different surface in the app. This page is a map; follow the links
|
||||
for the detail.
|
||||
|
||||
### Features
|
||||
| Goal | Where | Docs |
|
||||
|---|---|---|
|
||||
| Speak and have your words land in another app | Global hotkey → Captures tab + auto-paste | [Dictation](/overview/dictation) |
|
||||
| Record a thought, a meeting, or a voice memo inside Voicebox | Captures tab | [Captures](/overview/captures) |
|
||||
| Record a clip to clone a voice from | Voices tab → profile samples | [Creating Voice Profiles](/overview/creating-voice-profiles) |
|
||||
|
||||
- **Microphone input** - Record from any audio input device
|
||||
- **System audio capture** - Record desktop audio (macOS/Windows)
|
||||
- **Waveform visualization** - See audio levels in real-time
|
||||
- **Multiple formats** - Export as WAV, MP3, or M4A
|
||||
All three paths share the same STT backend — it's the surrounding workflow
|
||||
that differs.
|
||||
|
||||
### How to Record
|
||||
## Dictation
|
||||
|
||||
<Steps>
|
||||
<Step title="Select Input">
|
||||
Choose your microphone or system audio
|
||||
</Step>
|
||||
<Step title="Start Recording">
|
||||
Click the record button and speak clearly
|
||||
</Step>
|
||||
<Step title="Stop & Save">
|
||||
Click stop when finished
|
||||
</Step>
|
||||
<Step title="Use or Export">
|
||||
Use as voice sample or export to file
|
||||
</Step>
|
||||
</Steps>
|
||||
The 0.5.0 headline feature. Hold a chord anywhere on your machine, speak,
|
||||
release. The transcript lands in whatever text field you had focused,
|
||||
cleaned up by a local LLM if auto-refine is on. Captures accumulate in the
|
||||
Captures tab for later replay or re-transcription.
|
||||
|
||||
## Transcription
|
||||
Covered end-to-end in [Dictation](/overview/dictation).
|
||||
|
||||
Automatic speech-to-text powered by OpenAI's Whisper model.
|
||||
## Captures tab
|
||||
|
||||
### Features
|
||||
When you don't need to paste into another app — you just want a clean
|
||||
transcript of some audio — the Captures tab is the home. Record in-app,
|
||||
drop in a file (`.wav`, `.mp3`, `.m4a`, `.webm`, `.opus`, `.flac`), or dig
|
||||
through dictations that already landed there. Every capture keeps its
|
||||
original audio, can be retranscribed with a different model, and can be
|
||||
played back through any voice profile you have.
|
||||
|
||||
- **High accuracy** - Industry-leading speech recognition
|
||||
- **Multiple languages** - Supports 50+ languages
|
||||
- **Automatic detection** - Language auto-detection
|
||||
- **Timestamps** - Word-level timing information
|
||||
Covered in [Captures](/overview/captures).
|
||||
|
||||
### How to Transcribe
|
||||
## Voice profile samples
|
||||
|
||||
<Steps>
|
||||
<Step title="Select Audio">
|
||||
Choose a recording or upload an audio file
|
||||
</Step>
|
||||
<Step title="Choose Language">
|
||||
Select language or use auto-detect
|
||||
</Step>
|
||||
<Step title="Transcribe">
|
||||
Click transcribe and wait for processing
|
||||
</Step>
|
||||
<Step title="Review & Export">
|
||||
Review text and export as needed
|
||||
</Step>
|
||||
</Steps>
|
||||
A separate flow, in the Voices tab. When you're creating a profile from an
|
||||
audio clip, the sample is what the cloning engine actually learns from —
|
||||
the `reference_text` on a sample must match the audio *verbatim*, which is
|
||||
why samples are a different data model from captures.
|
||||
|
||||
You can promote a capture to a sample from the Captures tab's Send-to menu
|
||||
("Use as voice sample…"), which opens a reference-text confirm dialog so
|
||||
you can correct the last ~10% of transcript accuracy before saving.
|
||||
|
||||
Covered in [Creating Voice Profiles](/overview/creating-voice-profiles).
|
||||
|
||||
## Transcription models
|
||||
|
||||
All three paths share the same Whisper models. Pick a default in
|
||||
**Settings → Captures → Transcription**; override per capture if you need
|
||||
to.
|
||||
|
||||
| Model | Size | When to pick it |
|
||||
|---|---|---|
|
||||
| Whisper Base | ~300 MB | Fast. Default. Good for clean speech. |
|
||||
| Whisper Small | ~500 MB | Better quality, still fast. |
|
||||
| Whisper Medium | ~1.5 GB | High quality. |
|
||||
| Whisper Large | ~3 GB | Best quality, slow on CPU. |
|
||||
| Whisper Turbo | ~1.5 GB | Large-tier quality, ~5× faster than Large. |
|
||||
|
||||
On Apple Silicon the model runs through **MLX-Whisper** (~8× faster than
|
||||
PyTorch). Everywhere else it runs through PyTorch `transformers`. The
|
||||
backend picks the right one — you don't configure it.
|
||||
|
||||
<Callout type="info">
|
||||
Transcription is useful for creating voice samples from existing audio or generating subtitles.
|
||||
For noisy clips, prefer **Turbo** or **Large**. Base can hallucinate on
|
||||
hard inputs — most famously the "thanks for watching" loop. Voicebox
|
||||
strips those loops deterministically before LLM refinement runs, so a
|
||||
capture can be cleanly re-refined even if the raw transcript has them.
|
||||
</Callout>
|
||||
|
||||
## Language
|
||||
|
||||
You can pass a language hint for short clips (under ~5 seconds) where
|
||||
Whisper's auto-detect is unreliable. Set a default language lock in
|
||||
**Settings → Captures → Transcription → Language**, or override per capture.
|
||||
|
||||
## Transcription API
|
||||
|
||||
Developer-level detail on the STT backend, model loading, preprocessing, and
|
||||
the `/transcribe` endpoint lives in the
|
||||
[Transcription developer guide](/developer/transcription). The Captures
|
||||
pipeline also exposes `/captures` as a higher-level endpoint that wraps
|
||||
STT + archival + optional refinement in one call — see
|
||||
[Captures](/overview/captures#api-surface).
|
||||
|
||||
## Next steps
|
||||
|
||||
<Cards>
|
||||
<Card title="Dictation" href="/overview/dictation">
|
||||
Hold a chord anywhere on your machine, speak, release.
|
||||
</Card>
|
||||
<Card title="Captures" href="/overview/captures">
|
||||
The paired audio + transcript archive.
|
||||
</Card>
|
||||
<Card title="Creating Voice Profiles" href="/overview/creating-voice-profiles">
|
||||
Record or upload samples for voice cloning.
|
||||
</Card>
|
||||
</Cards>
|
||||
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,186 @@
|
||||
---
|
||||
title: "Voice Personalities"
|
||||
description: "Attach a personality to a voice profile, compose fresh in-character lines, and rewrite input text in their voice — all powered by a local LLM."
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Overview
|
||||
|
||||
A **personality** is an optional free-form description attached to a voice
|
||||
profile — who this voice is, how they speak, what they care about. Set one
|
||||
and two new controls appear next to the generate button, both powered by a
|
||||
bundled Qwen3 LLM running entirely locally:
|
||||
|
||||
- **Compose** — drop a fresh in-character line into the textarea. Click
|
||||
again for a different take.
|
||||
- **Speak in character** — a toggle that rewrites your input text in the
|
||||
character's voice before TTS, preserving every idea.
|
||||
|
||||
The LLM produces the text. The voice profile speaks it. No cloud round-trip,
|
||||
no external API — the whole loop runs on your hardware.
|
||||
|
||||
<Callout type="info">
|
||||
Personalities shipped in **0.5.0**. The same local LLM doubles as the
|
||||
refinement model for [Dictation](/overview/dictation) — one LLM in the app,
|
||||
not two, sharing one model cache and one GPU-memory footprint.
|
||||
</Callout>
|
||||
|
||||
## Setting a personality
|
||||
|
||||
Open a voice profile's edit view. The **Personality** field is free-form text
|
||||
up to **2,000 characters**. Describe the voice however helps you — past
|
||||
lines they'd say, speech patterns, tone, boundaries.
|
||||
|
||||
Good descriptions tend to include:
|
||||
|
||||
- A one-line identity (who they are)
|
||||
- Speech patterns (rhythm, vocabulary, what they avoid)
|
||||
- Representative phrases — example lines show the LLM the target tone
|
||||
better than adjectives
|
||||
- What the character *wouldn't* do (they don't explain, they don't
|
||||
apologize, they refuse to break character, etc.)
|
||||
|
||||
You can set a personality on any voice profile type — cloned or preset. The
|
||||
three modes work identically regardless of engine.
|
||||
|
||||
## The two actions
|
||||
|
||||
Each action is tuned for a specific job and the LLM temperature is adjusted
|
||||
to match.
|
||||
|
||||
### Compose
|
||||
|
||||
Generate a fresh utterance in the character's voice, with no seed text.
|
||||
Click the shuffle button to drop a line straight into the generate
|
||||
textarea; click again for a different take.
|
||||
|
||||
- **When to use:** prototyping, sampling a character's voice, brainstorming
|
||||
a line without typing one first
|
||||
- **Temperature:** hot — variety is the point
|
||||
- **Typical output:** a short, punchy line that fits the character's
|
||||
register
|
||||
|
||||
### Speak in character (rewrite)
|
||||
|
||||
Flip the persona toggle and whatever you type (or dictate) gets rewritten in
|
||||
the character's voice before TTS — every idea preserved, only the phrasing
|
||||
changes. High-fidelity mode: the content doesn't change, only the voice does.
|
||||
|
||||
- **When to use:** turning a dictated memo into in-character speech; lifting
|
||||
a plain-English script into a specific voice without editing by hand
|
||||
- **Temperature:** cold — faithfulness wins
|
||||
- **Typical output:** same ideas, same order, different phrasing and cadence
|
||||
|
||||
## Speech-only framing
|
||||
|
||||
Both modes enforce **speech-only** output. The LLM is prompted to
|
||||
produce things a person would actually say out loud — no narration, no
|
||||
action tags (`*sighs*`, `[laughs]`), no meta-commentary, no markdown
|
||||
formatting, no stage directions.
|
||||
|
||||
This is deliberate: the output is going straight into TTS, and anything that
|
||||
isn't speakable ends up either ignored or read literally. The speech-only
|
||||
framing also makes the output land cleanly inside dialogue, so you can drop
|
||||
a Respond result straight into a Story.
|
||||
|
||||
## The local LLM
|
||||
|
||||
The bundled LLM is **Qwen3**, available in three sizes:
|
||||
|
||||
| Model | Download size | Best for |
|
||||
|---|---|---|
|
||||
| Qwen3 0.6B | ~400 MB | Default. Very fast, good for casual use. |
|
||||
| Qwen3 1.7B | ~1.1 GB | Sweet spot for character personalities with specific phrasing. |
|
||||
| Qwen3 4B | ~2.5 GB | Full quality. Slowest. Useful for very particular tone. |
|
||||
|
||||
The model runs through the same backend split Voicebox already uses for TTS
|
||||
— **MLX** (4-bit community quants) on Apple Silicon, **PyTorch** (transformers
|
||||
`AutoModelForCausalLM`) everywhere else. Downloads go through the same cache
|
||||
and model-management UI as TTS models.
|
||||
|
||||
Pick a size in **Settings → Captures → Refinement → Refinement model** — the
|
||||
personality modes reuse it. If you switch models, both refinement and
|
||||
personality output pick up the change on the next call.
|
||||
|
||||
## Using the controls
|
||||
|
||||
Both controls appear on the floating generate box when the selected profile
|
||||
has a personality set.
|
||||
|
||||
<Steps>
|
||||
<Step title="Compose — shuffle a line">
|
||||
Click the shuffle button. The LLM runs and the result fills the generate
|
||||
textarea. Edit if you want, then hit generate.
|
||||
</Step>
|
||||
<Step title="Speak in character — toggle persona rewrite">
|
||||
Type (or dictate) what you want said. Flip the wand toggle on. Hit
|
||||
generate — Voicebox runs the text through the personality LLM first,
|
||||
then TTS speaks the rewritten version. Leave the toggle off for plain
|
||||
TTS.
|
||||
</Step>
|
||||
</Steps>
|
||||
|
||||
Compose always gives you something different on re-click. The persona
|
||||
toggle, on the other hand, is a mode — it applies to every generate call
|
||||
until you flip it back off.
|
||||
|
||||
## Use cases
|
||||
|
||||
- **Agents that speak in a voice you own.** Combine the persona toggle with
|
||||
the built-in [MCP Server](/overview/mcp-server) so Claude Code, Cursor,
|
||||
Cline, or any MCP-aware agent can talk back through a profile with a
|
||||
personality. The agent calls `voicebox.speak({ text, profile, personality:
|
||||
true })` and Voicebox rewrites the text in character before speaking.
|
||||
- **Interactive characters.** Games, narrative tools, accessibility
|
||||
experiences. A character with a personality description plus a cloned
|
||||
voice becomes a reusable prop.
|
||||
- **Accessibility.** People who can't speak in their original voice can
|
||||
keep a personality description of how they used to sound and use the
|
||||
rewrite toggle to turn typed input into in-character speech.
|
||||
- **Creative drafting.** Write a plain outline, flip the persona toggle,
|
||||
generate line-by-line into the character's voice, drop the audio into a
|
||||
Story.
|
||||
|
||||
## API surface
|
||||
|
||||
Personalities are accessible via REST:
|
||||
|
||||
| Method | Endpoint | Body |
|
||||
|---|---|---|
|
||||
| `PUT` | `/profiles/{id}` | Include a `personality` field up to 2,000 chars to set it. |
|
||||
| `POST` | `/profiles/{id}/compose` | No body. Returns a fresh in-character utterance as text. |
|
||||
| `POST` | `/generate` | Include `personality: true` to run input text through the personality LLM before TTS. Same for `POST /speak`. |
|
||||
|
||||
`POST /generate` with `personality: true` is the same primitive MCP's
|
||||
`voicebox.speak` tool uses when you pass `personality: true`. Scripts and
|
||||
agents can use it directly.
|
||||
|
||||
## Limits and gotchas
|
||||
|
||||
- **The personality is a prompt, not a fine-tune.** The LLM will sometimes
|
||||
drift out of character, especially on Compose at high temperature. Click
|
||||
again for another take.
|
||||
- **Long personalities are not always better.** 2,000 chars is a ceiling,
|
||||
not a goal. A sharp 300-char description with two example lines
|
||||
typically outperforms a long one.
|
||||
- **Speech-only framing is enforced, but not bulletproof.** Very large
|
||||
prompts or unusual inputs can sneak an action tag through. If you see
|
||||
`[laughs]` in TTS output, it's usually a personality-field hint the
|
||||
model anchored onto — remove it from the description.
|
||||
- **Rewrite is stricter than Respond.** If the output is changing your
|
||||
meaning, you probably want Respond (or a wholesale Compose with context
|
||||
in the input), not Rewrite.
|
||||
|
||||
## Next steps
|
||||
|
||||
<Cards>
|
||||
<Card title="Dictation" href="/overview/dictation">
|
||||
Dictate the input for Rewrite or Respond from anywhere on your machine.
|
||||
</Card>
|
||||
<Card title="Captures" href="/overview/captures">
|
||||
Captures feed personalities naturally — dictate a memo, rewrite it in
|
||||
a character voice, generate speech.
|
||||
</Card>
|
||||
<Card title="Creating Voice Profiles" href="/overview/creating-voice-profiles">
|
||||
Add a personality to an existing profile.
|
||||
</Card>
|
||||
</Cards>
|
||||
Reference in New Issue
Block a user