voice-tunnel

Talk to your coding agent from your phone. One command opens a page any phone browser can load — no app, no App Store — and carries audio both ways.

pipx install voice-tunnel
voice-tunnel serve --wake claude

Open the printed URL on your phone, tap once, and say "hey Claude, what's the status?"

Everything runs on your machine. No GPU. No account. No speech API.

What this is

The tool holds no model and makes no decisions. It turns your speech into lines in a log and text into speech; the agent that started it does the thinking. That is why it works with any agent — Claude Code, Codex and Grok have each driven it unchanged.

Phone browser (no install)
   |  HTTPS
   v
voice-tunnel serve  ── the dumb half ──────────────────────────────┐
   mic  -> wake gate -> speech recognition -> a line in a log      │
   spkr <- speech synthesis <- text handed to `voice-tunnel say`   │
                                                                   v
                                       The agent that started it (the smart half)
                                       watch --since <cursor> -> reason -> say

Install

pipx (recommended)

pipx install voice-tunnel
voice-tunnel doctor

pip

pip install voice-tunnel

npm

npm install -g @juanjofuchs/voice-tunnel

The npm package is a launcher, not a bundle — it needs Python 3.10+ on PATH and builds a private environment inside itself on install. pip install voice-tunnel does the same thing with one less layer.

WinGet (Windows, no Python needed)

winget install JuanjoFuchs.voice-tunnel

The only channel that needs nothing else installed. Windows may flag it on first run: the bundle is unsigned, and Defender's heuristic dislikes unsigned Python bundles.

Better voice and better recognition

The default install works immediately using your system voice and whisper base.en. Both are upgradeable, and the upgrades are worth it:

pip install voice-tunnel[all]      # or [piper] / [parakeet] individually

voice-tunnel download asr          # Parakeet — 8x faster than whisper, more accurate
voice-tunnel download voice        # a neural voice instead of the robotic one
voice-tunnel download voiceprint   # learns your voice, so the wake phrase becomes optional
voice-tunnel download turn         # ends your turn when you SOUND finished, not on a timer
voice-tunnel download --list       # what is available, what you already have

Models are downloaded, never bundled — a Parakeet checkpoint is 631 MB and would make the package unusable on a slow connection.

Use it

Start the tunnel with your agent's own name, and put its page somewhere your phone can reach.

voice-tunnel serve --wake claude          # or codex, grok, whatever is driving

Your phone needs HTTPS to reach a microphone at all — that is a browser rule, and a plain LAN address like http://192.168.1.20:8765 gives no microphone, not a broken one. The simplest fix:

tailscale serve --bg 8765
voice-tunnel config set VOICE_TUNNEL_ALLOW_CIDRS 100.64.0.0/10

Then, from the agent's side, this is the whole loop:

voice-tunnel watch --session dev --since -1   # BLOCKS until you speak; returns turns + a cursor
voice-tunnel say   --session dev "All green." # speaks back
voice-tunnel watch --session dev --since 7    # always resume from the cursor you were given

voice-tunnel describe prints the full contract as JSON. Point your agent at that — it is written to be read by a machine, and it carries the rules that matter, including the one an agent gets wrong first: watch blocks, so an agent not sitting in it has left you talking to nobody.

Saying its name

The summons is a greeting plus a name: "hey claude", "hi codex", "ok grok". The greeting is always required, which is what makes any name safe — grok is an English verb and cursor is a word you say constantly, but nobody says "hey grok" by accident.

voice-tunnel wake --name codex     # change it, live, no restart

Once the voiceprint knows you, you are addressed without saying anything.

Interrupting it

Start talking while it is speaking and it stops — but only for your voice. The voiceprint has to agree before a reply is cut off, so the television, someone else in the room, and the agent's own voice coming back through your speakers all leave it talking.

That last one is not a corner case. Without echo cancellation a reply leaks into the microphone on almost any device, and "the agent interrupts itself" is the default failure. Measured here: his voice scores 0.23 against a 0.15 threshold, the agent's own voice scores 0.000.

Needs voice-tunnel download voiceprint and a voice it has learned. Without one it stays quiet rather than guessing, because a tunnel that stops whenever the room makes a noise is worse than one you cannot interrupt.

Knowing when you have finished

By default a turn ends after a fixed silence — 1.5 seconds. That number is a compromise: shorter cuts you off while you are still thinking, longer makes every quick question wait for nothing.

voice-tunnel download turn replaces it with Smart Turn v3.2 (8 MB, CPU, BSD-2-Clause), which listens to how the sentence ended. A finished question closes early; a trailing "I was thinking that maybe we could…" gets more room. It runs once at each pause, not continuously, and if it is not installed the timer works exactly as it always has.

Requirements

No GPU. Every model here is CPU inference by construction — nothing in the codebase can use a graphics card. Measured on a 20-core desktop CPU:

• Python 3.10+ for pip and npm. WinGet needs nothing.
• A phone browser. Android Chrome is what this is tested on. The tab must stay in the foreground — background recording needs a native app, which this deliberately is not.
• HTTPS to the phone, via Tailscale or any tunnel. See Privacy.
• A slower CPU raises the real-time factor but does not break anything; the recognizer runs faster than real time with a lot of headroom.

Privacy

Speech recognition, synthesis, the voiceprint, and every turn of the transcript stay on your machine. There is no account and nothing is sent to a speech API.

The transport is your choice and they are not equivalent. Tailscale terminates TLS on your own device, so nobody else can decrypt the audio. An ngrok or Cloudflare tunnel terminates it at the vendor's edge — which puts the plaintext of everything you say on a machine you do not control. Sometimes that is the only thing that works, and it is still a trade worth making knowingly. If you expose it publicly, put real authentication in front of it: the built-in CIDR allowlist cannot help you there, because a tunnel forwards from localhost and every request therefore arrives from an allowed peer.

Your files are plain files. voice-tunnel config path says where. The voiceprint is a 192-dimension centroid — speech cannot be reconstructed from it.

Settings

voice-tunnel config show           # every setting, its value, and where it came from
voice-tunnel rate --speed 1.4      # talk faster — applies now and every session after
voice-tunnel verbose on            # narrate every action before doing it
voice-tunnel timing                # where the time actually went, per exchange

Precedence is process env > settings file > built-in default. .env.example documents every variable.

For agents

voice-tunnel describe

That is the product wedge, borrowed from agent-mail: an agent runs it, reads the JSON, and learns the whole contract without MCP setup, a daemon, or separate documentation. Every command also returns a next field telling the agent what to do at the moment it applies.

Development

python -m venv venv
venv/Scripts/python -m pip install -e ".[dev,all]"

venv/Scripts/python -m pytest tests/ -q     # unit tests, no mic and no model
venv/Scripts/python scripts/e2e.py          # the pipeline, through a real browser
venv/Scripts/python scripts/layout.py       # page geometry, at five viewports
venv/Scripts/python scripts/channel.py      # the orb, mute and the speaking signal

License

MIT.