Add dictation: speak into the message box without a spoken reply

[Piggidragon]

What

Dictation: speak into the message box without a spoken reply. Voice mode is a conversation; this is for when you only want words in the box.

A microphone button sits next to the voice-mode button, which becomes the waveform icon so the two are told apart. A line above the box shows whether you are heard and the words recognised so far, and switches where they go (remembered per browser):

• Edit first (default): each phrase is typed into the box at the cursor, spaced like a word, and the cursor moves after it. Dictate mid-sentence, fix a word by keyboard, send with Enter. Dictation keeps listening after a send.
• Send at once: a message is sent once you stop talking and it has been transcribed. Speaking again while a phrase is still being transcribed sends both together. A draft in the box is left alone, and a failed send puts the words back in the box instead of losing them.

How

Nothing new on the server. It reuses voice mode's in-browser Silero endpointing, LiveTranscription (speculative snapshots for the live words) and POST /api/sessions/:id/voice/transcribe, so it works as soon as Voice is enabled, needs no speech synthesis and loads nothing onto the GPU.

• web/src/use-dictation.ts: the hook. One run owns the mic, audio context and VAD; transcriptions are queued so phrases land in order. Stopping pauses the VAD first, so a sentence in progress is still delivered, then releases the mic once the queue is drained.
• web/src/dictation.ts: insertAtCaret and cleanTranscript (Whisper answers silence with [BLANK_AUDIO] / (silence); a transcript made only of such notes is dropped, brackets inside a sentence are kept).
• web/src/components/Dictation.tsx: button and status line.
• Chat.tsx: the caret and draft are tracked in refs so several phrases arriving before a render each land after the last; send is split into submit, so spoken text takes the same path as typed text (client commands included).

Voice mode and dictation share the microphone: starting voice mode stops dictation. Leaving the session aborts anything not yet transcribed, so words heard in one conversation cannot be sent to another.

Testing

• tests/dictation.test.mts (8 cases): caret insertion spacing and selection replace, silence placeholders. The root npm test now runs tests/*.test.mts instead of one named file.
• In a real Chrome, with a fake microphone playing recorded speech and Qwen3-ASR as the recogniser: strip states, phrase typed into the box, second phrase appended, insertion at the caret, mode remembered, send-at-once request contents (no voice flag), failed send restoring the text, mic tracks released on stop, voice mode releasing dictation's mic, refused microphone reported, no native dialogs.

Not tried with a physical microphone. The 60 s cap on a single recording (same as voice mode) is not exercised.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[coderabbitai]

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📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 5b67cc9 and f196825.

📒 Files selected for processing (9)

• docs/guide/voice.md
• package.json
• tests/dictation.test.mts
• web/src/components/Chat.tsx
• web/src/components/Dictation.tsx
• web/src/components/VoiceControl.tsx
• web/src/dictation.ts
• web/src/index.css
• web/src/use-dictation.ts

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