Voice

JCode has first-class voice support for dictation and voice mode 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, JCode 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-v2-int8 (STT) and kokoro-en-v0_19 (TTS, speaker 0 / voice 00).

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

Local STT models and language support

Model ID	Languages
`parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2-int8`	English only (default). Includes punctuation and capitalization.
`parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3-int8`	25 European languages, auto-detected: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian.

To use a non-English language, switch the local STT model to parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3-int8. v3 detects the spoken language automatically — there is no per-language setting for it. The language field below does not steer the local Parakeet model (v2 is English-only, v3 auto-detects); it only applies to the OpenAI STT provider.

{
  "version": 1,
  "features": {
    "dictation": {
      "stt": { "provider": "local", "model": "parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2-int8", "language": "en" }
    },
    "voiceMode": {
      "llm": { "provider": "claude", "model": "haiku" },
      "stt": { "provider": "local", "model": "parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2-int8", "language": "en" },
      "tts": { "provider": "local", "model": "kokoro-en-v0_19", "speakerId": 0 }
    }
  },
  "providers": {
    "local": {
      "modelsDir": "~/.jcode/models/local-speech"
    }
  }
}

For multilingual local dictation, set the model to v3 — it auto-detects the language, so no language field is needed:

{
  "version": 1,
  "features": {
    "dictation": {
      "stt": { "provider": "local", "model": "parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3-int8" }
    }
  }
}

The language field applies only to the OpenAI STT provider: set features.dictation.stt.language for dictation and features.voiceMode.stt.language for voice mode. If voice language is omitted, JCode uses the dictation language before falling back to en. It has no effect on the local Parakeet models.

OpenAI Voice Option

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

{
  "version": 1,
  "features": {
    "dictation": { "stt": { "provider": "openai" } },
    "voiceMode": {
      "stt": { "provider": "openai" },
      "tts": { "provider": "openai" }
    }
  },
  "providers": {
    "openai": {
      "stt": {
        "apiKey": "...",
        "baseUrl": "https://api.openai.com/v1"
      },
      "tts": {
        "apiKey": "...",
        "baseUrl": "https://api.openai.com/v1"
      }
    }
  }
}

providers.openai.stt covers dictation and voice mode speech-to-text, and providers.openai.tts covers voice mode text-to-speech. Because they resolve independently, you can point STT and TTS at different endpoints. Each falls back to providers.openai.apiKey/baseUrl, then OPENAI_API_KEY/OPENAI_BASE_URL, when unset. These settings configure only JCode OpenAI speech traffic, without changing Codex or other OpenAI-backed tools.

JCode uses these paths under the configured OpenAI base URL:

dictation STT: /v1/audio/transcriptions
voice mode STT: /v1/audio/transcriptions
voice mode TTS: /v1/audio/speech

Environment Variables

JCODE_VOICE_LLM_PROVIDER, voice agent provider override
JCODE_DICTATION_STT_PROVIDER, JCODE_VOICE_STT_PROVIDER, JCODE_VOICE_TTS_PROVIDER, speech provider selection (local or openai)
OPENAI_STT_API_KEY, OPENAI_STT_BASE_URL, OpenAI speech-to-text endpoint (dictation + voice mode STT)
OPENAI_TTS_API_KEY, OPENAI_TTS_BASE_URL, OpenAI text-to-speech endpoint (voice mode TTS)
JCODE_LOCAL_MODELS_DIR, local model storage directory
JCODE_DICTATION_LOCAL_STT_MODEL, local dictation STT model ID
JCODE_VOICE_LOCAL_STT_MODEL, JCODE_VOICE_LOCAL_TTS_MODEL, local voice STT/TTS model IDs
JCODE_DICTATION_LANGUAGE, dictation STT language (OpenAI STT only; ignored by local Parakeet)
JCODE_VOICE_LANGUAGE, voice mode STT language; falls back to JCODE_DICTATION_LANGUAGE when unset (OpenAI STT only; ignored by local Parakeet)
JCODE_VOICE_LOCAL_TTS_SPEAKER_ID, JCODE_VOICE_LOCAL_TTS_SPEED, optional local voice TTS tuning

Operational Notes

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

#Voice

#Philosophy

#Architecture

#Local Speech

#Local STT models and language support

#OpenAI Voice Option

#Environment Variables

#Operational Notes