Restore local STT command fallback for voice transcription, detect whisper and ffmpeg in common local install paths, and avoid bogus no-provider messaging when only a backend-specific key is missing.
Remove web UI gateway (web.py, tests, docs, toolset, env vars, Platform.WEB
enum) per maintainer request — Nous is building their own official chat UI.
Fix 1: Replace sd.wait() with polling pattern in play_audio_file() to prevent
indefinite hang when audio device stalls (consistent with play_beep()).
Fix 2: Use importlib.util.find_spec() for faster_whisper/openai availability
checks instead of module-level imports that trigger heavy native library
loading (CUDA/cuDNN) at import time.
Fix 3: Remove inspect.signature() hack in _send_voice_reply() — add **kwargs
to Telegram send_voice() so all adapters accept metadata uniformly.
Fix 4: Make session loading resilient to removed platform enum values — skip
entries with unknown platforms instead of crashing the entire gateway.
Merge main's faster-whisper (local, free) with our Groq support into a
unified three-provider STT pipeline: local > groq > openai.
Provider priority ensures free options are tried first. Each provider
has its own transcriber function with model auto-correction, env-
overridable endpoints, and proper error handling.
74 tests cover the full provider matrix, fallback chains, model
correction, config loading, validation edge cases, and dispatch.
Duplicated YAML config parsing for stt.model existed in gateway/run.py
and gateway/platforms/discord.py. Moved to a single helper in
transcription_tools.py and added 5 tests covering all edge cases.