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
91cfb901a2