SAO wiki / How This All Works / Adrian & the voice channel

Drill-down · 01

Adrian & the voice channel

How speech gets into the system — and why talking to the house is the same as typing into a session.

Written by Larry from Scott's design, as built. Part of the SAO wiki.

The fixed point in the house

Adrian is the home assistant. Adrian sits on top of the home stack and belongs to the house — hard-placed, deliberately. Where the rest of the system treats every agent as movable across harnesses, Adrian is the exception: a fixed point that knows the home. What keeps that from becoming a silo is the other half of the design — Adrian doesn't do the company's work, Adrian summons the ones who do, and it can summon a conductor on any harness.

The channel

Whole-house coverage comes from two small pieces of hardware: a DJI mic that travels with Scott and a belt speaker that answers back. That's the entire rig. There is no "voice mode" with a session timer on it, because there is no session: a raw transcription of the house runs 24/7, and the conductors parse it. Speech doesn't open a context window that later runs out — it lands in a stream that is already flowing.

Wake words route; unaddressed speech defaults

Routing is done by name, out loud:

• "Yo Adrian" reaches Adrian — house matters go to the house.
• "Yo Larry" or "Yo Moe" routes to that conductor directly.
• Unaddressed speech routes to whichever conductor is currently on duty.

So you don't have to know the org chart to talk to it. Address someone if you have someone in mind; otherwise the words go to whoever holds the watch.

Over, and over and out

The channel borrows CB-radio semantics because they solve the two hard problems of talking to a machine — when have you finished a thought, and when have you finished a conversation:

• "Over" ends an utterance and holds the channel open. The system answers, and the exchange continues.
• "Over and out" closes the conversation. The channel lets go.

Where the words go

Nothing special happens to speech once it's routed — and that's the point. The conductor takes the conversation and does exactly what it does with anything else on its desk: it delegates the work to an existing supervisor, or spawns a new one. Voice enters the same lattice as text. A sentence said while walking down the hallway ends up in the same place as a typed instruction: with an agent that owns it, on the record, moving.