Replaces the half-duplex per-playback barge monitors with ONE listener
that runs for the entire agent turn in continuous voice mode: armed at
utterance-submit, disarmed when the turn is fully done (response + TTS
finished). Fixes Teknium's live report that voice interruption never
works: (a) not while the LLM is generating, (b) not while TTS plays.
Root causes:
- HALF-DUPLEX GAP: the barge monitor only spawned when TTS playback
STARTED (cli.py streaming/whole-file paths, gateway _tts_stream_begin).
During LLM generation there was NO microphone listener at all.
- PLAYBACK DEAFNESS: the monitor calibrated its VAD noise floor WHILE the
speaker was blasting TTS (speaker bleed baked into the floor), then
multiplied it by 8x with a 1s strictly-consecutive block requirement —
normal speech could rarely reach the trigger, and the 2s grace
swallowed early interjections.
New model — tools/voice_mode.full_duplex_listen():
- Pre-playback calibration: quiet-room noise floor established at turn
start and HELD through playback (never recalibrated against bleed).
- Phase-aware trigger: generation = floor x voice.barge_in_threshold_multiplier
(new config, default 3.0, justified by synthetic-frame tests);
playback = additionally clamped to a 1500-RMS minimum so bleed alone
can't trip; 4000-RMS ceiling keeps speech always reachable.
- Windowed-majority detection (>=80% of a 300ms window) instead of the
strictly-consecutive counter that reset on intra-word energy dips.
- Grace on playback ONSET only (voice.barge_in_grace_seconds, default
down 2.0 -> 0.5) — suppresses the onset transient, not the mic.
- Debug diagnostics at every decision point (calibrated floor, per-window
RMS above 50% of trigger, trip/no-trip, grace suppressions) — always
logger.debug, mirrored to stderr under HERMES_VOICE_DEBUG=1.
Phase behavior (CLI cli.py + tui_gateway/server.py, same model):
- generation: speech interrupts the in-flight turn via the SAME seam the
typed/Ctrl+C interrupt uses (agent.interrupt()), cuts any pending TTS
pipeline so the stale reply never plays, and submits the captured
interjection (pre-roll capture, first syllable kept) as the next turn.
- playback: cuts TTS (streaming pipeline stop + fallback speak stop
events + file player) and submits the capture.
- stop phrase honored in BOTH phases: mid-generation 'stop' interrupts
the turn AND ends the voice chat (stop everything).
- one listener instance spans generation -> playback (no re-arm race);
double-arm refused (CLI _voice_fd_active / gateway _fd_listener_active).
Gateway specifics: _arm_full_duplex_listener() at _run_prompt_submit turn
start and inside _tts_stream_begin; _speak_text_with_barge registers its
(stop, done) pair in _fd_speak_pipelines so fallback speaks are cut and
tracked; _tts_stream_barge_in_monitor kept as a shim that arms the new
listener. Desktop renderer owns its own mic path (voice-barge-in.ts) and
is unaffected; if desktop backend-mic mode is used it inherits via the
gateway.
Tests: full_duplex_listen synthetic-RMS suite (speech-over-bleed trips,
bleed alone doesn't, quiet floor held through playback, grace window,
multiplier math 3x vs 8x, windowed-majority dips), CLI listener phase
tests (generation interrupt seam, playback cut, lifecycle spans phases,
double-arm, config forwarding, stop-phrase-mid-generation), gateway
generation-phase interrupt + stop-phrase tests. Generation-interrupt
test sabotage-verified.
