mouth: render chunks ahead of playback (no gap between lines); brain: print tool calls

.gitignore

@@ -10,3 +10,4 @@ uv.lock
 backtalk.egg-info/
 # your personal config, created at setup: never tracked, never touched by updates
 backtalk.json
+.backtalk_session

README.md

@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ The hearing and the voice run local: free, offline models on your machine, no vo
 - **Type instead whenever you want.** Typing in the terminal is the same conversation, and the reply is still spoken.
 - **It asks before it acts, in plain words.** When your agent wants to do something real, it asks out loud the way a person would ("I want to change a note in your vault called Recipes") and waits. An exact spoken yes approves; "details" reads you the exact command; anything else denies, with your words passed back as the reason, so "no, put that in drafts instead" actually steers it. Most read-only work passes without interrupting. Prefer auto-approve? Say "stop asking for permission" (or "turn off the permission prompts") and confirm; it changes its own config, and the first ask of every session reminds you the phrase exists.
 - **The voice console.** Session control by voice, so you never go back to the keyboard: "clear the session", "compact the session", "switch to the deep model" / "back to the fast model", "set effort to low" (or medium, high, max; this one saves itself as your default), "usage report", "go hands free" / "push to talk mode" for the microphone, "stop asking for permission" / "start asking again" for approvals. Exact phrases, spoken alone. (Credit where due: this grew out of a community member's own build shared in the Discord.)
-- **It can pick up where it left off.** Set `"resume_last_session": true` in the config and every launch reattaches to your previous conversation instead of starting cold, so closing the window stops costing you the thread. Off by default. And the built-in voice has a pace dial: `"speed"` in the config, 1.0 native, 1.15 brisker. (Credit where due: both grew out of a community proposal by aram-cloudstak.)
+- **It can pick up where it left off.** Set `"resume_last_session": true` in the config and every launch reattaches to your previous conversation instead of starting cold, so closing the window (or a crash) stops costing you the thread. On a reattached launch the agent opens by saying where you left off and asking whether to continue or start fresh; say "start fresh" (or "clear the session") to start over, or just keep talking. Off by default. And the built-in voice has a pace dial: `"speed"` in the config, 1.0 native, 1.15 brisker. (Credit where due: both grew out of a community proposal by aram-cloudstak.)
 - **Music ducks while it speaks** (Spotify, macOS) and comes back up after.
 - **It thinks out loud.** While the agent works, you hear the processing sound from my videos, so a pause never reads as a dead line. Silence it with `"thinking_sound": ""` in the config.
 
@@ -56,7 +56,7 @@ Two engines, and the setup wizard offers you both instead of quietly defaulting.
 
 ## Give it a face (optional)
 
-backtalk writes tiny state files while it listens, thinks, and speaks, so anything can watch them and react in real time.
+backtalk writes tiny state files while it listens, thinks, and speaks, so anything can watch them and react in real time: `.voice_state`, `.voice_waveform`, `.voice_loading_pid`, plus `.voice_heartbeat` (unix time, rewritten every ~2 s while backtalk is alive — stale means dead or hung) and `.voice_activity` (JSON `{ts, turn_started, line}` naming what the agent is doing mid-turn, e.g. `Read: foo.py`; deleted when the turn ends). All in `signals_dir`.
 
 - **[ai-visualizer](https://github.com/jaredrhod/ai-visualizer)** is the matching face: four full-screen visualizers, including the living circuit board from my videos. Point its `bus_dir` at this folder (or set `signals_dir` here to its folder) and it performs your actual conversation, idling, listening, thinking, and speaking along with the voice.
 - **[barehands](https://github.com/jaredrhod/barehands)**: point `barehands_state_dir` at its `state/` folder and the on-screen ring becomes your agent's face, breathing while idle, spinning while thinking, and pulsing with the voice while it talks.

TROUBLESHOOTING.md

@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ Written for humans AND for AI assistants. If you're an AI helping someone debug
 - **Mic permission never appeared / recording is silent**: launch from a normal terminal window, not a background service or launcher daemon: the process inherits the *terminal's* microphone permission. Check the input device: `python -m sounddevice` lists them.
 - **It hears me but answers slowly**: check `model` in `backtalk.json`. Full-size deep-work models make every reply noticeably slower; the fast tier is the point of a voice loop. Also confirm the model id is the FULL id, never a bare alias; aliases can silently resolve to an older model through the SDK's bundled CLI.
 - **First reply after launch is slow**: that's the one-time prompt-cache toll, mostly hidden behind the greeting. Warm turns are the real speed.
-- **It starts cold and forgets the last conversation after a restart**: that is the default (a fresh session every launch is predictable). Want it to pick up where it left off? Tell your agent to set `"resume_last_session": true` in backtalk.json. From then on every launch reattaches to the previous conversation, and a stale saved session falls back to fresh with a log line instead of breaking the launch. The saved conversation lives on your machine as a Claude Code transcript (kept for 30 days from last use by default), and a long conversation never dies from length: it compacts itself automatically, older turns becoming a summary while recent ones stay verbatim. Start over any time by saying "clear the session."
+- **It starts cold and forgets the last conversation after a restart**: that is the default (a fresh session every launch is predictable). Want it to pick up where it left off? Tell your agent to set `"resume_last_session": true` in backtalk.json. From then on every launch reattaches to the previous conversation and the agent opens by saying where you left off and asking continue-or-start-fresh ("start fresh" clears it; otherwise just keep talking); a stale saved session falls back to fresh with a log line instead of breaking the launch. The saved conversation lives on your machine as a Claude Code transcript (kept for 30 days from last use by default), and a long conversation never dies from length: it compacts itself automatically, older turns becoming a summary while recent ones stay verbatim. Start over any time by saying "clear the session."
 - **The voice talks too fast or too slow**: the built-in voice has a pace dial, `"speed"` in backtalk.json. 1.0 is native, 1.15 is brisker, 0.9 is slower. ElevenLabs pace lives in the `master` chain's atempo value instead.
 - **Updating, or an update that complains about local changes**: run `./update.sh` (`update.bat` on Windows) in this folder, or double-click the `Update` icon if setup left one. It shows what changed before applying it and can never touch your `backtalk.json`. If an older updater said "couldn't fast-forward" or mentioned local changes, run `./update.sh` once and it clears: it moves your config out of git's sight and everything flows after.
 - **The voice sounds robotic**: you're hearing Kokoro's base register, or the wrong voice for the language. Try `bm_george`, `bm_daniel`, `am_michael`, `af_heart`. Remember the first letter must match the language pipeline (`b…` British, `a…` American).