cogno-vox

Voice/audio I/O edge for the Cogno cognitive pipeline — speech-to-text in, text-to-speech out, behind provider-agnostic fallback chains.

cogno-vox is the mouth and ears of Cogno. Where cogno-anima is the mind (pure cognition) and cogno-engram is the memory (persistence substrate), cogno-vox is the transport edge that sits on the two boundaries of the pipeline:

gateway ──▶ [vox STT] ──▶ cogno-anima (NOUMENO…SUPEREGO) ──▶ [vox TTS] ──▶ gateway
             audio→text                                        text→audio

It is the most decoupled of the libraries: the core imports neither cogno-anima nor cogno-engram — it only converts audio ⇆ text.

Status: alpha — core (ports + OpenAI-compatible backends + fallback chains) and the unit suite are in place.

Two capability-scoped ports

Like cogno-anima's LLMBackend/Embedder and cogno-engram's three ports, each direction is a structurally-typed Protocol with its own fallback chain (try tier 1→N, first non-empty wins, all-fail → raises):

OpenAICompat* covers any /v1/audio/transcriptions or /v1/audio/speech server — local or cloud differ only by base_url/api_key, no SDK needed (just httpx).

Async by design

Everything is async (httpx.AsyncClient) to run under concurrent request load alongside cogno-anima/cogno-engram. Provider SDKs are lazy-imported behind extras (pip install "cogno-vox[bedrock]"); the OpenAI-compatible HTTP path needs no extra.

Host-injected config (no YAML, no env contextvar)

The host owns tier selection (model ladder, per-tenant routing, BYOK). You hand the factory a VoxConfig:

from cogno_vox import VoxConfig, TierConfig, create_transcriber, create_synthesizer

config = VoxConfig(
    transcribe_tiers=(
        TierConfig(provider="local", model="Systran/faster-whisper-small",
                   base_url="http://localhost:8000"),
        TierConfig(provider="groq", model="whisper-large-v3-turbo",
                   base_url="https://api.groq.com/openai/v1", api_key="gsk_..."),
    ),
    synthesize_tiers=(
        TierConfig(provider="local", model="kokoro",
                   base_url="http://localhost:8880/v1", voice="af_alloy"),
        TierConfig(provider="openai", model="tts-1", voice="alloy",
                   base_url="https://api.openai.com/v1", api_key="sk-..."),
    ),
    default_tts_format="opus",   # mandatory for Telegram native voice notes
)

stt = await create_transcriber(config).transcribe(audio_bytes, "voice.ogg")
print(stt.text, stt.tier, stt.elapsed_ms)

out = await create_synthesizer(config).synthesize("Olá, tudo bem?")
# out.audio (bytes), out.fmt, out.tier, out.elapsed_ms

split_text_for_tts() slices long replies into ~30s segments (≈65 words) at sentence boundaries — one voice note each.

What stays in the host

Provider/model selection, RBAC premium gating, BYOK & key rotation, the channel delivery (sendVoice/sendMedia) and the channel-mandated format choice. cogno-vox offers opus/mp3; the host decides.

The Cogno ecosystem

cogno-vox is one organ of Cogno — a family of small, composable, Apache-2.0 libraries that together form a complete conversational-agent platform. Each library owns a single concern and stays infra-agnostic; a host assembles them into a running agent:

The open-source libraries are the organs; the host is the body that joins them. Our reference host — cogno-host, with its cogno-ui dashboard — is the private product layer, but it holds no special powers: everything it does rides on the public seams documented in each library's docs/HOST_INTEGRATION.md, so you can assemble a body of your own.

Develop

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest tests/unit -q          # mocked HTTP, no network
ruff check cogno_vox && mypy cogno_vox

Live integration tests (gated, auto-skip)

tests/integration runs end-to-end against real local servers and auto-skips unless pointed at them (same pattern as cogno-engram's ENGRAM_TEST_DSN). Validated against fedirz/faster-whisper-server (Systran/faster-whisper-small) and ghcr.io/remsky/kokoro-fastapi-cpu. The bundled docker-compose.yml brings both up:

docker compose up -d           # whisper :8000, kokoro :8880

VOX_TEST_WHISPER_URL=http://localhost:8000 \
VOX_TEST_KOKORO_URL=http://localhost:8880/v1 \
pytest tests/integration -q   # synth (Kokoro) -> transcribe (Whisper) round-trip

See docs/HOST_INTEGRATION.md for wiring cogno-vox onto the two edges of the pipeline.

License

Apache-2.0.