Voice Mode on your phone
5 min read
Voice Mode turns one session into something you listen to. When it is on, the Wingman narrates completed turns as spoken audio, and you answer by talking - the step up from reading the Chat view yourself when your hands and eyes are busy.
Turning it on
There are three ways in, and they suit three different moments:
- One session, from the session. Open it, pick the Voice mode tab, and tap Switch to voice mode.
- One session, from where you already are. Switch to voice mode is in the three-dot menu on the Chat and Terminal screens, so you never have to go looking for the tab.
- The whole fleet, in one tap. On the roster's Voice sessions tab, a button turns voice mode on for every session at once - and offers the opposite once it is on. This is the walking-out- of-the-house control: put the fleet on voice as you leave, take it off when you get home.
A session in voice mode shows up on the roster with a voice indicator, and every completed turn with a written answer in it is sent for narration. A clip is not guaranteed. When one cannot be made - there is nothing to read aloud, an account condition is blocking it, the speech service is down, the session's computer is on a build too old to send its conversation, or three minutes pass with nothing produced - the screen tells you which of those it is rather than going quiet. The table below is the whole list of answers it can give.
Listening
When a narration is made, your phone downloads the whole clip before offering playback - so when it says ready, it plays instantly. A fresh clip plays automatically while you are on the screen, with a full player: play and pause, restart, and a seek bar. Leave halfway through and it resumes where you stopped. If the agent starts working again, the old narration is retired - you never act on stale news.
- Respond and Snooze - the two big buttons at the top of the screen, in the same place in every state. Respond: speak, review the transcript at Pause if you want, then Send - the reply transcribes and submits in the background. Snooze silences the session for your default length and returns you to the list; once your snooze lengths have been read from your Gateway, a caret beside it opens a Snooze for sheet listing them.
- Regenerate response and Turn voice off - in the session menu: rebuild the narration for the current turn, or go back to a normal session.
- Generate narration now - offered on the status card when the Gateway says a narration can be made on the spot.
What the screen can tell you
The one question voice mode has to answer is why is it quiet. So the screen never just goes silent: your Gateway decides what is true about this session's voice and the phone shows you that verdict word for word. These are the states you will meet - every one the screen can show.
| What it says | What it means |
|---|---|
| Voice off | This session is not in voice mode. The screen offers the button that turns it on. |
| Agent is working | Mid-turn. Nothing is offered on purpose: the last narration is stale, and the next completed turn will be narrated. |
| Voice ready | There is audio to play. Occasionally it arrives with a note saying you were switched to a backup voice because the usual one was overloaded - no extra charge, and nothing else changes. |
| Voice on its way | The narration is being made right now, a first attempt is being retried automatically, or your phone is pulling the finished audio down. From a minute in, the wait is shown beside it and climbs in whole minutes. |
| Voice did not arrive after 4m | Three minutes have passed with nothing produced, so the screen stops promising. Your Gateway keeps trying underneath, and you can read the turn instead - but you are told plainly rather than left watching a spinner. |
| Voice service down | The speech service itself is unavailable. Nothing on your side is wrong and nothing needs doing. |
| Voice needs credit, Monthly limit reached, Finish setup, Not included with this account | An account condition, not a fault in this session. Each one carries the sentence that says what to do - the same sentence every other DevThrottle screen shows for the same condition. See pricing for what a plan includes. |
| Monthly fair-use limit reached, Voice unavailable | Account conditions too, but the two with nothing to press. The fair-use allowance for included AI features resets at the start of next month. Voice unavailable is the deliberately neutral answer when your Gateway is refused for a reason this build does not recognise - it never guesses that you are out of credit. Both say so and offer no button. |
| Update DevThrottle | The computer running this session is on an older DevThrottle that cannot send its conversation up, so there is nothing to read aloud. Updating that machine fixes it with no other action from you. |
| Nothing to read aloud | The session does need you, but it is sitting on a prompt or a menu rather than a written answer - so there is genuinely nothing to narrate. Not a failure. |
| No narration yet | Voice is on and this turn has not been narrated yet. This is the one state where Generate narration now can help, so it is the one state that offers it. |
You will never be shown a button that cannot work: where the answer is "there is nothing to make" or "it has already failed", the screen says so instead of offering to try again.
The language and the voice
What the narration sounds like is set once for your whole account, not per phone: open the menu, pick Settings, then the Language tab. Each language lists the voices it offers, and Play sample speaks a sample sentence using the account's real setup - what you audition is what every narration will sound like, on every phone and browser you use. The models behind narration run through your DevThrottle account - see pricing for what a subscription includes.