Streaming replies and STT, amplitude lip-sync, one place for speaking

Latency: replies are spoken sentence-by-sentence off the desk API's NDJSON
endpoint, so the wait is time-to-first-sentence rather than the whole model
call, and Deepgram's live websocket transcribes while you're still talking
instead of uploading the WAV afterwards. Both fall back invisibly — a stream
that fails before anything was said drops to converse(), and a socket that
never opens just means the old one-shot path.

Speaking lived in four near-copies in the controller (a reply, a holding line,
a streamed sentence, a dialogue scene) that had already drifted: one didn't arm
barge-in, another skipped the follow-up rule. It's now speech.Speaker plus an
Utterance describing the policy differences, with collaborators injected so the
whole of it tests without Qt or audio.

The mouth follows the audio rather than a timer: tts.level_of reduces each PCM
frame to a 0..1 loudness on a sqrt curve (speech sits well below peak, and a
linear map leaves the mouth barely open during normal talking) and that indexes
the talking frames, which the sprite script now draws as an openness ramp.
Offline pyttsx3 has no waveform, so stale levels hand control back to the timed
loop instead of freezing the mouth mid-syllable.

Also: the pet starts where you left it (ignoring positions on monitors that are
no longer connected, since restoring those faithfully is how it ends up
somewhere unreachable), and `python -m bolt_pet --doctor` is a preflight that
says what to do about each problem rather than only what's wrong.

tests/test_pipeline_smoke.py breaks the pure-logic rule on purpose. Every unit
test passed all week while notifications sat unspoken for minutes, the pet said
things twice and [laughing] got read aloud — each an interaction between two
individually-correct units. It drives whole turns against a real HTTP server on
a loopback port, faking only the mic and the speakers. It found a NameError in
the paint path that would have fired on every repaint while talking.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

bolt_pet/speech_text.py

@@ -97,10 +97,34 @@ def _bullets_to_sentences(text: str) -> str:
     return " ".join(line if line[-1] in ".!?:,;" else line + "." for line in lines)
 
 
+# ElevenLabs v3 delivery tags — "[laughing]", "[whispering]", "[sighs]". They
+# are instructions to the *dialogue* model (see dialogue.py), and only inside a
+# dialoguectl scene. Left in an ordinary reply they reach eleven_flash_v2,
+# which has no idea what they mean and simply reads the word: observed live
+# 2026-07-31, the pet announcing "laughing That one came through clean".
+#
+# Matched narrowly — a bracketed adverb/gerund, or one of the noise words that
+# aren't either — so real bracketed text ("[1]", "[see the docs]") survives.
+_AUDIO_TAG_RE = re.compile(
+    r"\[\s*(?:"
+    r"[a-z]+(?:ly|ing)"
+    r"|laughs?|chuckles?|sighs?|exhales?|inhales?|gulps?|pause|beat"
+    r"|clears throat|shouts?|whispers?|cries|sings?|gasps?|snorts?"
+    r"|sarcastic|excited|curious|nervous|angry|sad|happy|deadpan|flat"
+    r")\s*\]",
+    re.IGNORECASE,
+)
+
+
+def strip_audio_tags(text: str) -> str:
+    """Remove v3 delivery tags from text destined for the ordinary voice."""
+    return _AUDIO_TAG_RE.sub(" ", str(text or ""))
+
+
 def for_speech(text: str) -> str:
     """Plain prose for the TTS engine: no markdown, no emoji, no bare URLs,
     no stray symbols that would be read out character by character."""
-    text = (text or "").strip()
+    text = strip_audio_tags((text or "").strip())
     if not text:
         return ""
     for symbol, spoken in _PRE_SPOKEN_SYMBOLS.items():
@@ -136,8 +160,11 @@ def is_question(text: str) -> bool:
 
 def for_display(text: str) -> str:
     """What the speech bubble shows: markdown syntax removed (the bubble
-    can't render it) but emoji and layout-ish punctuation left alone."""
-    text = (text or "").strip()
+    can't render it) but emoji and layout-ish punctuation left alone.
+
+    Delivery tags go too — the voice no longer says them, so showing them
+    would caption a laugh nobody heard."""
+    text = strip_audio_tags((text or "").strip())
     if not text:
         return ""
     text = _strip_markdown(text, keep_emoji=True)