tts

TTS - Text to Speech

Speak text aloud with the local tts binary, and manage two voice-mode dials: cadence (on-demand vs. always) and style (terse vs. verbose narration).

Argument parsing

Recognize these tokens in the arguments, in any order:

• off — turn always-mode off: run pst-voice clear, confirm, and stop.
• always — turn on always-mode. always verbose also turns on narration.
• verbose without always — narrate the CURRENT turn only (one-shot); write no state.
• No recognized token → treat the whole argument as literal text to speak (or, with no argument at all, summarize the recent conversation). This is the original behavior.

pst-voice is on the plugin's PATH. Set/clear state with:

pst-voice set always            # always, terse
pst-voice set always verbose    # always + narration
pst-voice clear                 # off

After set/clear, briefly confirm to the user which mode is active, then behave accordingly for the rest of this turn.

Speaking (all modes)

Run the summary or narration through tts in the background:

tts "Your spoken message here"

ALWAYS run tts via the Bash tool with run_in_background: true and no trailing &. A trailing & is redundant, trips a command-safety prompt, and fires the completion notification before the audio finishes playing.

Cadence and style behavior

• On-demand (default): speak once when invoked, then stop.
• always (terse): at the end of each turn, speak a concise 1-3 sentence spoken summary of what happened.
• always verbose / one-shot verbose (medium narration): speak a one-line opener of the plan at the start, a short note at each significant decision or when you change approach, and a one-sentence wrap-up at the end.

While always-mode is on, a plugin hook injects a [pst voice] reminder into your context at the start of each turn. Treat that reminder as the signal to speak this turn per the active style. (You do not need to re-read state yourself — the hook does it.)

Guidelines

• Keep spoken text conversational and natural — it will be spoken aloud.
• Focus on actionable takeaways: what was decided, what changed, what to do next.
• Avoid technical syntax, file paths, code snippets, or markdown in spoken text.
• If the user provides literal text (e.g. /pst:tts "custom message"), speak that directly instead of summarizing.
• Escape any quotes or special shell characters before passing to the command.
• Say "id" as "eye-dee" (e.g. "click up id" → "click up eye-dee").
• Say "Nutiliti" as "newtility" (a play on "new utility", new-TIL-ih-tee).
• The tts binary streams audio live as it generates — nothing is saved to disk, so there is no file management.