A transcription that landed while the private Whisper service was
restarting (an image roll) crashed hermes_stt_client.py with a raw
urllib ConnectionRefused traceback that got dumped into the
conversation. The client now retries the request with backoff (up to 5
attempts, ~10s - long enough to ride an STT pod restart) and, on a
persistent outage, exits with one concise line ('speech transcription
unavailable...') instead of a stack trace. Delivered via the coordinator
ConfigMap; the next reconcile picks it up.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BvMSXH8VH2tMWXanb8SJdf
Final conversation-mode polish from mobile testing:
- The Workspace toggle now sits with the chat/Telegram nav at every
width: nav.rail on desktop, the top app titlebar on mobile. The
floating pill that pushed the mobile composer's control row (and the
conversation-mode button) off screen is gone - a fallback exists only
for headless DOMs and is pinned to a top corner, never over the
composer.
- The conversation orb watermark is now the Hermes character avatar
(static/hermes-agent-192.png) instead of the caduceus staff.
- User-facing 'hands-free' copy renamed to 'Conversation mode'.
- Wrong-voice fix: strongReplyLanguage flagged Spanish on a single
accented char, so an English reply naming European cities (Zürich,
Málaga) overrode the correct English STT detection and was spoken by
the Spanish voice. Detection now requires density (Cyrillic >=4 at
>=50%, or inverted punctuation / >=2 accents corroborated by Spanish
stopwords); plain English always speaks English, forced language wins,
accent-free Spanish still routes via trusted STT. 294 voice tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BvMSXH8VH2tMWXanb8SJdf
- Captions read message bodies only (the scraper was concatenating
avatar, author and worklog chips); multi-segment interim turns are
now speakable and drive clean speak-to-thinking-to-speak cycles when
playback drains mid-turn.
- Dynamic endpointing: complete-looking partials (3+ words or terminal
punctuation) endpoint at the base window; the long hold remains only
for one-two-word fragments. A stale-busy 10s settle wait on every
post-error send is gone.
- Both overlay captions are bounded, touch-scrollable regions with
follow-tail; caps raised for long turns.
- Error envelopes are never spoken or captioned; errored turns run
resyncCapture (fresh STT session on the hot mic).
- Workspace toggle now lives in the sidebar rail (floating button only
below the rail breakpoint).
- False 'session unavailable' toast root-caused: the router continuity
guard shows it on a 409 that fired when a transient profile-listing
failure failed closed into a fake cross-profile mismatch; the patcher
now answers from the alias cache and never claims a default-vs-named
mismatch while aliases are unconfirmed.
- Barge-in sends carry a one-line cut-point marker with the last spoken
sentence; visible-history truncation judged infeasible client-side.
- Language switching works end-to-end: sticky per-session STT language
hint (restarting an unused next session on switch), reply voice from
script evidence, STT detection, then stopword heuristic; cues and WAV
fallback share the turn language.
- Legacy CI guards: node skip for the DOM probe, ffmpeg/codec skips for
the container-fallback test. 272 voice-lane tests green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BvMSXH8VH2tMWXanb8SJdf
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.
