Voice input¶

Speech-to-text for the reyn chat TUI, powered by faster-whisper.

What it does¶

Press Ctrl+R to start recording; press Ctrl+R again to stop. The transcribed text is inserted into the input bar. The voice layer lives entirely in chat/tui/ — the OS and skill layers have no awareness of it (P7).

Backend¶

faster-whisper (Systran/faster-whisper-<model> on HuggingFace) provides local, offline transcription via CTranslate2. The model downloads on first use and is cached in the HuggingFace hub cache. Audio is captured at 16 kHz mono via sounddevice (PortAudio). Inference runs in asyncio.to_thread so the Textual event loop never blocks. A small model on Apple Silicon transcribes 5 s of audio in ~1 s once loaded.

Enabling¶

pip install "reyn[voice]"

The base install never imports sounddevice or faster-whisper. Without the extras, pressing Ctrl+R shows a friendly in-TUI error rather than crashing.

Configuration (`reyn.yaml`)¶

voice:
  enabled: true           # false = hard-disable Ctrl+R even if deps are installed
  model: small            # tiny | base | small | medium | large-v3
  language: "ja"          # ISO 639-1 code; "" or null = Whisper auto-detect
  device: cpu             # cpu | cuda (no Metal backend; explicit cpu avoids Mac issues)
  compute_type: int8      # int8 | float16 | float32
  cpu_threads: 4          # pin to 4 to avoid OpenMP deadlock on Apple Silicon
  max_duration_s: 300.0   # auto-cancel after 5 min to prevent runaway memory

Language detection¶

Default is language: "ja" (Reyn's Japanese-enterprise focus). Short clips misidentify as other languages at non-trivial rates when auto-detect is on. Set language: "" or language: null to opt back into Whisper auto-detection.

Limitations¶

No Metal backend. faster-whisper does not support Apple Metal/MPS; device: cpu is correct on Mac.
Model download on first use. small is ~460 MB. The TUI pre-loads the model in the background as soon as recording begins, so the second Ctrl+R invocation pays the load cost, not the first.
Silence gate. Audio with peak amplitude below 0.005 is skipped entirely; Whisper halluccinates on pure noise. vad_filter is disabled.
Timeouts. Transcription times out after 120 s; mic open/close after 5 s.
Debug mode. REYN_VOICE_DEBUG=1 saves captured WAV files to /tmp/reyn-voice-debug-<ts>.wav and writes a log to /tmp/reyn-voice.log.