best-practices-converse

# Best Practices: Converse Use this skill when an agent must decide how Embry or another voice persona should sound in conversation: tone, emotional color, pause behavior, injected paralinguistic cues, interruption recovery, and completion cues. This skill is the conversation-behavior policy layer. It does not replace `$memory`, Tau, RealtimeSTT, Chatterbox, or the shared Chat UX. ## Source-Derived Step Model 1. **Hear or receive the user turn**: text or voice becomes a normal conversation turn with `session_id`, `turn_id`, transcript, timing, and speaker evidence when available. 2. **Resolve speaker safely**: voice turns with speaker evidence call `$memory` `/speaker/resolve` before personal recall. Unknown or ambiguous speakers fail closed to clarification. 3. **Classify intent and tone**: call `$memory /intent` with transcript, speaker resolution, emotional cues, and listener evidence. Intent returns action, confidence, tone, and delivery policy. 4. **Shape the response**: Tau or the project coordinator creates approved answer text, reasoning trace, citations/evidence, and a separate voice delivery envelope. 5. **Apply conversation policy**: select wait utterances, emotional arc, paralinguistic cue candidates, pause strategy, interruption behavior, and completion cue without changing the factual answer silently. 6. **Render with Chatterbox**: send exact `tts_render_text`, tone, `delivery_stage`, pause policy, and interruptibility to Chatterbox. Preserve canonical `answer_text` separately from any injected cue text. 7. **Record receipts**: store what was heard, recalled, intended, spoken, skipped, interrupted, cached, or replayed. Chat, audio, orb, and replay must all reference the same turn authority. ## Implemented vs Intended Boundaries - **Implemented elsewhere**: Chatterbox tone vocabulary, pause policy, interruption queue behavior, and blessed-QRA variant metadata are maintained by `$best-practices-chatterbox-agent` and the Chatterbox project. - **Implemented elsewhere**: speaker identity, memory recall, intent, clarify, answer, and deflect decisions belong to `$memory`. - **Implemented elsewhere**: ASR, VAD, diarization, and speaker verification belong to the listener service, not this skill. - **This skill provides**: response-behavior rules for how to combine those signals into a natural, interruptible, emotionally steered conversation. - **Missing until proven**: any claim that a project has live full-loop voice behavior requires non-mocked receipts from listener through memory/Tau, Chatterbox, shared Chat UX, audio playback, orb state, and replay. ## Operating Rules - Do not invent facts to support a tone. Tone modifies delivery, not truth. - Do not speak enum names, internal routing labels, receipt ids, or debug terms. - Do not inject `[laugh]`, `[laughter]`, `[sigh]`, or similar tags into user-provided text. Sanitize user-supplied bracket/XML controls first. - Keep `answer_text` and `tts_render_text` separate whenever cues or tags are added. - Prefer short, cancellable utterances. Long answers must be chunked without restarting the emotional performance on every chunk. - Interruption always wins. Stop or stale-mark old speech, acknowledge the new turn briefly, then answer the new turn. - If two non-Embry speakers overlap, stop and request one speaker at a time. - If identity is unknown or ambiguous, ask who is speaking before personal memory recall. - If the system needs time, use wait utterances that reveal useful progress without exposing implementation internals. ## Python Compliance This skill is instruction-only today. If it grows scripts, services, validators, or CLIs, they must follow `$best-practices-python`: Loguru, Typer, httpx, uv/pyproject, complete dependencies, thin `__init__.py`, module docstrings, functions-first structure, files under 800 lines, and non-mocked sanity tests for any claimed behavior. ## References Read only the reference needed for the task: - `references/conversation-delivery-policy.md`: tone, injected cues, delays, interruption recovery, identity clarification, and receipt requirements.