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Comment by mattw2121 | Hacker News Reader

100% agree. I've been building MCPs that enable Claude (my agent of choice to have voice conversations with). These hook into my home maintenance system (https://homemaintlist.com) and workout tracking system (https://tallyup.codewalkers.net) plus several private mcp servers I've made to expose Claude to specific services. These all allow me to just have conversations with Claude and have all these very specific things available and take action on them.

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Curious how you talk to Claude? I have some automations set up but I feel locked into Gemini on android if I want to be able to use a wakeword (e.g. while driving). I use Claude for non-voice but haven't found a convenient way to start up a chat with Claude.

I looked into this a bit yesterday and had similar issues. One hacky option on Mac could be to [1] use BlackHole virtual audio device as the system default input (which Claude expects), [2] vibe code some app that can pick your actual mic as the input device (browser engines seem to have a pretty good support for this stuff), [3] stab a speech-to-text model there (whisper or lighter) that detects the wake word from a stream and [4] proxies the audio after that to the output side of BlackHole. I did not try it myself yet, though.

You could make a push-to-speak-hardware-button and talk like walkie-talkies. If you have an existing device and you only want to do it in software, there's usually extra buttons you can bind to, like the "AI" button, or volume button.

Yeah...wish there was a better way than just opening the app and clicking the voice button. I haven't found one. My talking is usually in the car, so it's not too inconvenient for me to do that.

I see, yeah that works when I know I'll be in a situation for a while where I may want the option to say something or going over something like verbal brainstorming but I find I am much more often having a random thought and want to capture it right away without pulling out my phone or interrupting what I'm doing.

Can only hope google relaxes their limitations on choice of ai assistant. In the meantime I'm setting up a raspi with openwakeword to just act as an interface for voice to voice interactions for while I'm home.

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