GENesis-Voice

The voice edge for Genesis. It gives a Genesis install ears and a spoken voice through a Home Assistant Voice PE device — running entirely on hardware you control, with the cloud touched only for the conversational model you opt into.

Three capabilities ship here, independent of each other:

• Conversational (bridges/s2s_bridge): wake-word, full-duplex spoken conversation backed by OpenAI's Realtime speech-to-speech model. Production-ready.
• Ambient (bridges/ambient_bridge): always-on passive listening that transcribes locally (no cloud STT). Stage 1 — capture only. It writes to its own isolated, short-lived database and never contacts Genesis. The path from ambient transcripts to Genesis memory is deliberately not built yet (see the design notes); this is the sensory substrate, not a finished feature.
• OMI wearable (bridges/omi_bridge): a mic-only ambient wearable — a portable peer of the Voice PE. Receives OMI's real-time transcript webhook and writes into the same isolated ambient.db (source=omi-<uid>). Stage 1 — capture only, never contacts Genesis. Two ambient devices, one substrate.

Topology — three boxes

Voice is not part of Genesis. It runs as a separate edge so the always-on audio path stays isolated from the cognitive core. Each box can be a VM or a container.

1. Home Assistant + Voice PE (required hardware). HA runs the device and the ESPHome add-on that builds and flashes the firmware in firmware/.
2. Voice Edge (a dedicated VM or container — not HAOS, not the Genesis box). Runs the bridges. This is where audio is handled — and where the OMI webhook receiver accepts OMI's cloud transcript push (the one authenticated public ingress).
3. Genesis (the cognitive core). Receives only the conversational tool/prompt traffic today; ambient stays on the edge.

The device-to-edge wire protocol and the edge-to-Genesis surfaces are specified in CONTRACTS.md.

Layout

firmware/         ESPHome custom component + device config + wake word ("hey genesis")
bridges/
  s2s_bridge/     conversational bridge (OpenAI Realtime); edge/ holds the VM deploy
  ambient_bridge/ ambient capture service (VAD -> local STT -> isolated ambient.db)
  omi_bridge/     OMI wearable webhook receiver (real-time transcript -> shared ambient.db)
deploy/           install scaffold + systemd units
docs/             setup guide + architecture diagram
CONTRACTS.md      device->edge WS protocol, edge->Genesis surfaces

Setup

See docs/SETUP.md for the full walkthrough: flash the firmware, stand up the edge box, deploy the bridges, and point the device at the edge. Every install-specific value (network, model paths, tokens) lives in your own .env and secrets files — the code is generic.

Status

• s2s_bridge — in active use.
• ambient_bridge — Stage 1 (local capture verified end-to-end). Diarization, the filtering/attention tiers, and any graduation of signal into Genesis are future work and intentionally absent here.
• omi_bridge — Stage 1 (capture only). Real-time transcript webhook → shared ambient.db. The attention engine and any graduation of signal into Genesis are future work; the same firehose-quarantine and graduation boundary apply.

License

MIT. See LICENSE. bridges/s2s_bridge derives from an upstream pipecat example; its original notice is preserved in bridges/s2s_bridge/LICENSE.upstream. The firmware derives from the Home Assistant Voice PE ESPHome firmware.