Voice, dictation, and memory
Listen to agents, talk to them, and inspect what they remember.
Spoken replies
Pick a voice engine in App Settings, choose a voice, and use the speaker control on a response. Auto-speak can read new replies as they arrive. Three engines are available:
- ElevenLabs — cloud voices, needs an API key.
- Built-in Mac voices — the voices already installed on macOS, no key.
- Chatterbox (local) — an open-source, MIT-licensed engine reached through an OpenAI-compatible server you configure. With a server on your own machine there is no cloud call; the address can also point at any HTTP(S) server you choose.
The harness rewrites code-heavy Markdown into speech-friendly text before synthesis. Keys remain on the harness and never reach the renderer.
Chatterbox (local)
Dash Bot speaks through any OpenAI-compatible server that runs Chatterbox behind POST /v1/audio/speech — for example LocalAI with a Chatterbox model installed, or a small wrapper service around pip install chatterbox-tts.
- Start your Chatterbox server locally and note its address, for example
http://127.0.0.1:4123. - In App Settings, pick Chatterbox (local) as the voice engine, paste the server address, and set the model id your server expects (the default is
chatterbox-turbo). - Pick a voice. Voice ids come from the server's
/v1/modelslisting when it has one; otherwise a Default entry uses the server's built-in voice.
There is no API key. Dash Bot sends the text to the configured server address, so synthesis stays on your machine only when that server is local. Per-agent voice overrides work the same as with the other engines, and a dead or unreachable server is reported as a clear error instead of a hang.
Call mode
On macOS, call mode combines native on-device speech recognition with the configured voice. It is deliberately half-duplex: the microphone pauses while the bot speaks to prevent the app from transcribing its own audio.
Tool progress and approval requests can be narrated during a call so long-running work does not sound disconnected.
Dictation
The composer microphone uses Apple's local speech recognition in the macOS desktop build. Linux and Windows dictation are not currently shipped.
Memory
Each bot can keep plain-text memory that you can inspect, correct, or delete. Memory is not a hidden remote profile; it lives with the local Dash Bot data.