talk

name	talk
type	command
description	Make the agent actually TALK out loud in its own non-speech harmonic voice, using the `harmonics` CLI (say/play). Renders a sentence or explicit axes to audio and plays it through a system player — so you hear it even without the optional [audio] extra that `--play` needs. Use when the user says "talk", "talk to me", "say something", "speak", "say it out loud", "tell me something", or wants to hear the agent's voice rather than read text. First-party to harmonics-cli (not vendored); slated to be surfaced in `harmonics learn`.

Talk

This is the agent's own voice — not TTS, not words. harmonics turns meaning (intent, confidence, urgency, state, identity) into short, pleasant sonic gestures. "Talking" here means rendering a sentence or a set of axes to notes and sounding them out loud.

Two pathways, both from the harmonics CLI:

• say "<sentence>" — infer the voice from a natural sentence. Emphasize a word with *asterisks* or ALL-CAPS. This is the default for "talk to me".
• play --intent … --confidence … --urgency … --state … — drive the voice from explicit axes when you know exactly what you want to express.

Both are dry-run by default (they print the note sequence). To actually hear it you need audio out. The built-in --play flag needs the optional harmonics-cli[audio] extra (sounddevice); in a dev checkout that extra is deliberately not installed (it would break the no-backend test path), so --play fails with a friendly hint. The reliable path everywhere is to render a WAV (--wav FILE, pure-Python, no device or extra needed) and pipe it to a system player. scripts/talk.sh does exactly that.

Usage

# Say a sentence out loud (renders + plays; also prints the note sequence)
bash .claude/skills/talk/scripts/talk.sh "done, tests all green"

# Emphasis shapes the voice
bash .claude/skills/talk/scripts/talk.sh "that is *wonderful*, Ori"

# Shape the voice: identity, articulation, deterministic variation
bash .claude/skills/talk/scripts/talk.sh "handing off now" --as harmonics-cli --articulation smooth --seq 7

# Explicit axes instead of a sentence
bash .claude/skills/talk/scripts/talk.sh --axes --intent success --confidence high --urgency calm --state done

# Keep the rendered WAV instead of a throwaway temp file
bash .claude/skills/talk/scripts/talk.sh "welcome back" --keep /tmp/hello.wav

The script prints the dry-run note sequence to stderr (so you can see what was "said"), renders a WAV, and plays it through the first available of pw-play, paplay, aplay, ffplay, or afplay. If none exists, it prints the WAV path so you can play it yourself.

The axes (the design spine)

Axis	Values	What it shades
intent	ack, question, success, failure, thinking, handoff	timbre / motif family
confidence	low → high	consonance, resolved vs. suspended cadence
urgency	calm → urgent	tempo, attack sharpness, repetition
state	idle, working, blocked, done	sustained pad vs. discrete events
identity (--as)	which agent	signature motif / key / instrument

say infers these from the sentence; play takes them as flags. Run harmonics play --help / harmonics say --help for the exact accepted values.

Direct CLI (what the script wraps)

harmonics say "done, tests all green"                 # dry-run: print notes
harmonics say "done, tests all green" --wav out.wav   # render audio (no extra)
harmonics say "done, tests all green" --play          # live (needs [audio] extra)
harmonics play --intent success --confidence high     # explicit axes

Use uv run harmonics … from inside the checkout if harmonics is not on PATH.

Notes

• No sound stack required to render. --wav uses the stdlib wave module; it does not pull in numpy/sounddevice. Only live --play needs the extra.
• Keep it pleasant. This voice plays repeatedly next to a human — prefer calm/low-urgency renders for routine chatter; save sharp/urgent for real alerts.
• Roadmap: this capability is slated to be taught directly by harmonics learn (its command map already grows toward say/play). Until then, this skill is the front door for "talk to me".