A whole session by voice, on a walk
5 min read
There is a version of this product where you close the laptop, put one earbud in, and keep working - not checking on work, doing it. Voice mode reads each agent's turn out loud as it finishes, you answer by talking, and the phone moves to the next one waiting. An hour's walk becomes an hour of steered work, and you never look at the screen.
Setting it up takes about ten minutes the first time. The walk can be as long as you like.
You need your phone already paired, and at least one session running on a machine you are leaving behind. If the phone is not paired, do that first - you cannot set it up from the footpath.
Before you leave: put the whole fleet on voice
Open DevThrottle on your phone and switch the roster to the Voice sessions tab. At the top is one button that counts your fleet as it asks: Turn on voice mode for all 4 sessions if you are running four, Turn on voice mode for all 1 session if just one. Tap it once. From now on every session sends each completed turn that has a written answer in it for narration - including sessions that start after you walk out the door. A clip is not guaranteed for every turn; when one cannot be made the screen says why, and Voice on your phone lists those answers.
This is a fleet-wide switch, not a phone setting: your sessions are now speaking, whether or not this phone is listening. If a machine is offline when you tap it, its sessions join when it comes back - the button tells you what changed and what was skipped.
Turn on Auto-speak
On the same tab, tick the Auto-speak checkbox. This one is about your phone, not the fleet: when a session finishes a turn and is waiting on you, the phone opens it by itself, oldest first, and plays the narration without a tap.
The two switches are separate on purpose. Voice mode on with Auto-speak off is a fleet that speaks when you choose to listen; both on is the hands-free queue this walk needs.
Start walking, and just listen
When a session needs you, the phone opens it and reads the turn out loud - what the agent did, and what it is asking. If you miss something, the player at the top has play, pause, restart, and a seek bar. The full text is on screen below the controls, but the point of this mode is that you do not need it.
Answer with Respond
The two buttons you act with sit at the top of the screen, same place in every state, big enough to hit while moving. The first is Respond - it is there whenever a narration is up. Tap it, say your answer, and tap Send. If you want to check what the transcription heard, tap Pause first and read it; otherwise just send.
Your reply is transcribed and delivered in the background, and the screen goes straight back to the queue. You do not wait for the agent - after the queue's deliberate pause, the next session waiting on you opens and is read to you.
Clear the rest with Snooze
Not everything on a walk deserves an answer. The second button is Snooze: one tap silences that session for your default length and returns to the queue. Once your own snooze lengths have been read from your Gateway, a narrow caret sits beside it and opens a Snooze for sheet listing them, for the session that needs longer than your default.
Snooze is the verb that keeps the walk moving. An agent asking something that needs a screen, a session you want to think about at your desk - snooze it, and it will be waiting when you are back. Answering badly at pace is the only real mistake this mode lets you make.
Know the way out of the loop
After a Respond or a Snooze, the queue waits three seconds before opening the next session, and says so on screen: uncheck Auto-speak in that pause and the loop stops. That pause is the designed exit - without it you would be carried from session to session with no moment to leave.
A session you have just listened to is also passed over for a short while, so a single busy session cannot trap you in a one-item loop.
Come home
Back at your desk, open the Voice sessions tab again. The same button now reads Turn voice mode off for all sessions. Tap it, untick Auto-speak, and the fleet is silent again.
Next
The Voice mode screen in full - the player, the status cards, and the language and voice the narration speaks with - is on Voice Mode on your phone. Dictation everywhere else, and the custom dictionary that stops it mangling your project's names, is on Voice. For the thirty-second version of working from your phone - one agent, one question, back in your pocket - see Answer an agent in thirty seconds.