Wake word detection

What it is

Wake word detection is an always-listening hotword that arms Omniscio's voice system without a keypress. Say a phrase and the app begins listening, so the keyboard never has to be in reach. It is off by default, so it is strictly opt-in, and it needs the master Voice toggle on to do anything at all.

Where to find it

Settings -> Voice Control -> Voice Input tab -> the Wake Words card, where the engine picker, keyword selector, sensitivity, action mode, focus-only switch and a Test button live. Settings search answers to "wake word". It requires both wakeWordEnabled and voiceEnabled; turning it on while Voice is off shows a master-gate banner instead of silently doing nothing.

How it behaves

• Two engines, one live. The bundled free engine (openWakeWord, no key and no account) is the default; the paid Picovoice engine is retired and hidden from the picker, and a stale Picovoice selection silently falls back to the free engine.
• The bundled keywords are computer and hey-omniscio, with hey-omniscio ticked by default; the retired jarvis keyword is dropped on load.
• Action mode is a picker: command (the default — the transcript is parsed and dispatched through the same intent parser Alt+V uses) or dictation (typed into the active session).
• Focus-only listening is on by default; sensitivity defaults to 0.7; audio is fed in 16 kHz mono batches with a rate limit of 8 batches per second.
• Known limitation, stated plainly: neither surviving keyword head scores near the 0.60 fire line on real speech, so hands-free wake is a known gap until a head is trained from real voice clips — synthetic text-to-speech training does not transfer.

For agents

• Service: src/main/services/wake-word-service.ts.
• Free engine: src/main/services/wake-word/openwakeword-engine.ts.
• IPC: src/main/ipc/wake-word-handlers.ts.

Related

• voice-and-tts.md
• flowvoice.md
• keyboard-shortcuts.md