dcssvox
Hands-free voice control and narration for Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, built for playing on a phone under Termux with headphones and a mic.
You say what to do; it reads back what happened. No keyboard, no screen-staring.
you: "explore"
it: "You encounter a bat."
you: "attack east"
it: "You hit the bat. Health 17 of 19."
Why it works
DCSS is turn-based and lives in a terminal, which makes it close to the ideal
target for voice: nothing has a reaction window, and both the screen and the
input are trivially machine-accessible. dcssvox runs crawl inside tmux and
drives it from outside — keystrokes in via send-keys, the rendered screen out
via capture-pane. crawl itself is never patched.
Three design rules, all aimed at someone whose hands are busy:
- Never stuck. There is no keyboard to bail out with, so every modal state
is recognised and has a spoken way out.
recover()walks crawl back to normal play without needing to classify the state correctly. - Never surprised. Irreversible actions (quaff, drop, read, take off) are read back and wait for "yes" before a key is sent.
- Never guessing. Item and spell names are matched against the letters crawl just printed on screen, not a hand-maintained table. If nothing matches convincingly it says so instead of pressing something.
Speech priority comes from crawl's own message channels: dcssvox pins each of the 30 channels to a colour in its generated rc, so the SGR code on a message row is an exact, language-independent priority signal. "An endoplasm is nearby!" is urgent; "The endoplasm barely misses you." is not read at all.
Install (Termux)
pkg install crawl tmux git cmake clang make
pip install dcssvox
dcssvox doctor # tells you what's missing
For speech output also install the Termux:API app (from F-Droid) plus
pkg install termux-api. For voice input:
dcssvox setup # builds whisper.cpp + fetches tiny.en (one time)
dcssvox play
Watch the game on screen any time with tmux attach -t dcssvox.
Without a mic
dcssvox type runs the exact same loop with typed input — useful for testing
the command vocabulary, and it works on any Linux box.
Vocabulary
| Say | Does |
|---|---|
| explore / keep going | auto-explore until something happens |
| north, go east, southwest | move one square |
| run north | travel in a direction |
| attack east | attack an adjacent monster |
| rest / wait | long rest / pass one turn |
| downstairs / travel to the stairs | descend / auto-travel |
| what's around | read the monster list (no turn used) |
| status / where am i | health, magic, statuses, location |
| inventory | read what you're carrying |
| quaff curing / read blinking / wield mace | menu actions by name |
| stop / cancel | interrupt, back out of anything |
| again | repeat the last thing said |
Anything outside the vocabulary is dropped in silence rather than guessed at — with an always-on mic that refusal is the whole safety model.
Status
Alpha. The deterministic loop is verified end-to-end against crawl 0.34.1.
Optional LLM assistance (for long spell/item names, and for phrasing outside
the fixed grammar) is planned via pip install dcssvox[llm].
License
MIT
1 maintainer
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