Voice

Paseo has first-class voice support for dictation and realtime conversations with your coding environment.

Philosophy

Voice is local-first. You can run speech fully on-device, or choose OpenAI for speech features. For voice reasoning/orchestration, Paseo reuses agent providers already installed and authenticated on your machine.

This keeps credentials and execution in your environment and avoids introducing a separate cloud-only voice stack.

Architecture

Speech I/O: STT and TTS providers per feature (local or openai)
Local speech runtime: ONNX models executed on CPU by default
Voice LLM orchestration: hidden agent session using your configured provider (claude, codex, or opencode)
Tooling path: MCP stdio bridge for voice tools and agent control

Local Speech

Local speech defaults to model IDs parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3-int8 (STT) and kokoro-en-v0_19 (TTS, speaker 0 / voice 00).

Missing models are downloaded at daemon startup into $PASEO_HOME/models/local-speech. Downloads happen only for missing files.

{
  "version": 1,
  "features": {
    "dictation": { "stt": { "provider": "local", "model": "parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3-int8" } },
    "voiceMode": {
      "llm": { "provider": "claude", "model": "haiku" },
      "stt": { "provider": "local", "model": "parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3-int8" },
      "tts": { "provider": "local", "model": "kokoro-en-v0_19", "speakerId": 0 }
    }
  },
  "providers": {
    "local": {
      "modelsDir": "~/.paseo/models/local-speech"
    }
  }
}

OpenAI Speech Option

You can switch dictation, voice STT, and voice TTS to OpenAI by setting provider fields to openai and providing OPENAI_API_KEY.

{
  "version": 1,
  "features": {
    "dictation": { "stt": { "provider": "openai" } },
    "voiceMode": {
      "stt": { "provider": "openai" },
      "tts": { "provider": "openai" }
    }
  },
  "providers": {
    "openai": { "apiKey": "..." }
  }
}

Environment Variables

OPENAI_API_KEY — OpenAI speech credentials
PASEO_VOICE_LLM_PROVIDER — voice agent provider override
PASEO_LOCAL_MODELS_DIR — local model storage directory
PASEO_DICTATION_LOCAL_STT_MODEL — local dictation STT model ID
PASEO_VOICE_LOCAL_STT_MODEL, PASEO_VOICE_LOCAL_TTS_MODEL — local voice STT/TTS model IDs
PASEO_VOICE_LOCAL_TTS_SPEAKER_ID, PASEO_VOICE_LOCAL_TTS_SPEED — optional local voice TTS tuning

Operational Notes

Realtime voice can launch and control agents. Treat voice prompts with the same care as direct agent instructions, especially when specifying working directories or destructive operations.