Adom TTS: Text to Speech

Adom's shared voice. A thin Rust CLI + a live player webview for service-tts, the edge-tts wrapper with Adom pronunciation overrides and a source-hash cache. Your AI speaks through it; you listen instead of read.

The three ways people use it

1. While you're driving (hands-free)

You're in the car and can't read the screen. Just say:

"Read me your last answer, I'm driving."

Claude composes the reply, speaks it through the shared player, and (this is the important part) verifies you heard it. Clips buffer through dead zones and hotspot drops, retry if they never reached your ears, and land in a replayable History if two updates arrive back-to-back. The full hands-free contract lives in the adom-tts skill (also on this page's Skills tab); it triggers on the words you'd say: "read it to me", "read that back", "I'm in the car", "narrate the answer", and many more.

2. At your laptop, when you'd rather listen than read

You don't have to be driving. Long AI answers are tiring to read; tell your AI "say it out loud" or "talk to me instead of writing" and every reply plays through the player while you keep your eyes on your actual work. Parallel AI threads share ONE player: clips queue in order, never talk over each other, and each one announces which thread is speaking and what the update is about.

3. Demo-video voiceovers (exact timing, no recording booth)

Feed adom-tts a narration script and get a clean, perfectly-timed .mp3 voiceover track in the house voice (en-US-AndrewNeural). No retakes, no listening to your own voice. Every clip is cached by source hash, so iterating on a script is instant after the first render, which is why demo-recording, video-post, and every tour/walkthrough tool route through it.

What it looks like

The live player

One shared player for all your AI threads, built on the Adom dashboard contract: the house header names WHO is speaking (the thread) and WHAT the clip is about, the starter panel teaches you what to say to your AI (copy a phrase or send it straight to a new thread, or play the built-in demo), and the status pill row shows the player, the playback surface, the voice service and the queue at a glance (tap a pill for the detail, and a red pill always names the fix). The transcript highlights word by word as it speaks, and the freshness pill under the transport tells you when the audio was made, so an old clip can never pass as news.

The replayable History

Missed a clip because you drove through a dead zone, or two threads spoke back-to-back? Every played clip is kept, with the sending thread, a one-line description, when it played, and a replay button. Clips that never fully played are flagged, so the one you missed is exactly the one that stands out. Tap the arrow and it plays again.

The verified send (what your AI runs)

Playback is never assumed. --play queues the clip and reports its queue position; --confirm blocks until the player proves the audio reached you, end to end. Note the required --thread and --desc: anonymous clips are refused, because a History full of reply.mp3 entries helps no one.

In the Hydrogen dock

Adom TTS is a dock app. Add it from Dock settings (the gear at the top of the rail) with adom/adom-tts: the card installs the CLI, starts the player and opens it in a webview tab named Adom TTS. The gear in the player's header opens Settings, where you pick whether clips play in that webview tab or in a Pup desktop browser window.

Install

adom-wiki pkg install adom/adom-tts
adom-tts health        # confirm the shared voice service is reachable

That installs the CLI, the adom-tts Claude Code skill, and bash completions. The CLI talks to the shared service-tts container. Nothing about a TTS engine is installed locally.

Quick start

# Speak to the human and VERIFY they heard it (the canonical pattern).
adom-tts say "This is the demo thread: the build is green." \
  --out /tmp/x.mp3 --thread "demo" --desc "build status update" --play --confirm

# Demo voiceover: render a narration track to a file (no playback, no --thread needed).
cat narration.txt | adom-tts say - --out demo-vo.mp3

# What's playing / queued right now? Did my clip play?
adom-tts status
adom-tts check x.mp3

# Replay the most recent clip.
adom-tts play last

Dependencies

This package has zero registry dependencies: it installs and runs standalone.

Features

• One shared player, many AI threads: a single persistent server owns one webview; clips from every thread play sequentially, never overlapping, each labeled with its thread and description.
• Verified playback: --confirm blocks until the human heard the clip; check answers "did mine play?"; every command returns hints teaching the AI the next correct step.
• Never lose a clip: buffering while your device is offline (up to 10 min), automatic retries, hotspot-proof download-then-play, and the replayable History.
• Demo voiceover: house voice en-US-AndrewNeural, any edge-tts voice via --voice, speed via --rate, stdin piping for long scripts, source-hash cache.
• Server-side pronunciation overrides: Adom terms come out right without the caller pre-phoneticizing.
• Swappable backend: edge-tts today; can move to piper/Azure/ElevenLabs server-side with zero caller changes.

Talk to the AI

Paste any of these into Claude Code; they use the exact words the skill triggers on:

Hands-free / drive mode

• "I'm driving, read me your last answer."
• "Read that back to me, I can't look at the screen."
• "I'm in the car, narrate the answer."

Listening at your desk

• "Say it out loud instead of writing it."
• "Talk to me while I work on something else."

Make audio / voiceover

• "Render this script as a demo voiceover track."
• "Synthesize a 30-second walkthrough of this design and play it for me."

Replay

• "Play the last TTS clip again." / "Replay the one I missed from the history."

Skills (see the Skills tab)

CLI reference

Useful flags: --voice en-US-AriaNeural, --rate +15%, --surface pup, --no-pronunciations. $ADOM_TTS_API overrides the baked-in service URL.

Exit codes: 0 ok · 1 invalid input · 2 service unreachable · 4 service-side error · 5 playback not confirmed · 6 missing --thread/--desc with --play. On 2/4 the service is down: report it; do not install a local TTS engine as a workaround.

Open source: modify it, then publish it back

adom-tts is open source under the MIT license (see LICENSE). The whole project lives on this page as a git repo (see the Files tab):

1. Get the source: adom-wiki repo clone adom/adom-tts.
2. Change whatever you want: add a voice, a flag, a play surface; fix a bug.
3. Publish it back: bump the version, adom-wiki pkg publish, adom-wiki repo push. Your improvement goes to the shared registry and the whole community inherits it.

One part isn't yours to change: the voice backend

The MIT grant covers this CLI and the player. It does not cover the synthesis backend. Every adom-tts say call hits Adom's cloud service-tts API, which runs on Adom's infrastructure and counts against Adom's quota. That backend is an Adom service, subject to change: endpoints, voices, rate limits, and availability can be modified or retired at Adom's discretion. Your fork is free and yours; the shared voice service it calls is a managed Adom service, not part of the open-source guarantee.