Three conversational fixes for hands-free chat:
- The microphone now stays hot for the whole session: capture runs on
its own epoch, re-arms immediately after each utterance endpoints,
and keeps recording through transcribing/thinking/speaking - speech
is never lost to Hermes being busy. Speech onset during a response
cancels it through the live capture path (echo-guarded exactly like
the old monitor) without touching the running recorder.
- When the user talks over Hermes before any visible reply appeared,
the interrupted utterance and the follow-up are stitched into one
message (20s window), so the response addresses the whole thought.
- TTS speaks 15% faster by default (server-side length_scale, no pitch
shift), user-tunable via hermes-voice-tts-speed (0.5-2.0), honored on
streaming, WAV fallback and thinking-cue paths.
245 voice-lane tests pass; single getUserMedia site preserved;
Dockerfile grep guards verified.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BvMSXH8VH2tMWXanb8SJdf
Port the original #27 detected-language pipeline onto the verified PR #39 prerequisite while preserving the current-main conversation instrument and host continuity changes.
Keep voice selection server-side with no user selector or client voice field. Reuse 207c16ab only for its stricter exact-code trust boundary, omitting malformed or absent language so Piper defaults to Amy.
Supersede draft PR #26 with a merge-safe prerequisite: bake and preload the amy, irina, and claude Piper models, route only validated server-side language to fixed voices, and leave the live voice deployment manifest unchanged.
Remove the pinned WebUI speaker selector and its persisted preference, omit client voice fields from every outbound TTS path, and keep hands-free Voice Mode and the conversation instrument intact. Hostile or legacy voice fields remain ignored by the Piper server.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>