Voice

A box is a directory of your data, kept under version control with a full history of changes (using git); a card is a markdown file with a structured header; the agent is the coding agent (Claude Code or Codex) that operates the box. Voice is a first-class way in and out of the box, on both desktop and phone, not a bolt-on to typing.

What it does for you

• Dictate a chat message with spoken controls: say "send message," "erase message," or "microphone off" instead of reaching for the screen.
• Keeps dictating through a brief network drop or the microphone getting grabbed by something else, instead of losing what you said.
• A narration mode for long, loose voice dumps: the box stays quiet, transcribes, and files what you said rather than chatting back line by line.
• A voice memo recorded on the phone becomes an audio card with a transcript and a short summary once transcription finishes.
• A capture session groups a burst of photos and spoken remarks from one sitting into a single readable timeline.
• The agent's replies can be spoken aloud, and the agent chooses the voice, pacing, and emphasis for each spoken reply, not just one fixed narrator.
• Short sounds (earcons) mark recording start, stop, failure, and send, so you know the state of the microphone without looking.
• On the phone, speech recognition runs on the device itself.
• Your exact spoken words are kept as a quote when the agent turns them into a card or note, not smoothed into the agent's own phrasing. See provenance.md.

What it needs

A transcription vendor key for accurate, high-quality transcription: OpenAI, Mistral, or Deepgram. A microphone, in the browser or on the phone. The iPhone app for on-device speech recognition. A text-to-speech provider for spoken replies: OpenAI, or Gemini through OpenRouter. See ../install/index.md.

How it works, briefly

Recording happens in the browser or the iPhone app. The recording is transcribed by the vendor key you've configured, or on-device on the phone, and the transcript becomes a chat message or a card. A spoken reply comes from a delivery instruction the agent writes into its response, naming the voice and how to say it; the box turns that into audio.

Limits

Per-message voice overrides only apply in chat, not in background jobs or procedures. The documentation does not describe offline (no-network) voice support.

Go deeper

chat.md, phone-capture.md, provenance.md, ../reference/chat-voice.md, ../reference/narration-mode.md, ../reference/cards/audio.md, ../reference/cards/capture-session.md