Owner's first live mic test (2026-09-17) drove four changes:
- ONE primary transcription input at all times: while a quiz/ask
question waits, finals land in its field (text mode → 'Your answer',
select modes → 'Your thinking') via a module-level claim registry
(useDictationTarget in dictation.tsx); the composer is the fallback.
Esc in a question field also stops dictation (threaded through
DockOverlay → QuestionDock).
- No interim results: live words were distracting and shifted the meter.
Params now match the pi dictate extension exactly (no interim_results,
endpointing=300, no utterance_end_ms); the meter's width stays fixed.
- Optimistic meter: the click enters the meter view immediately (Stop
pill + meter within one frame, verified at 150ms in the dev shell);
token mint and mic acquisition run concurrently behind it.
- Wide idle button: the stats-bar middle is one full-width affordance —
a quiet bordered 'Dictate' button when idle (failure text replaces the
label), Stop pill + fixed meter while live.
Live-verified in the Electron dev shell: wide button renders on home
(167px) and chat (358px), meter + Stop appear at 150ms after click,
flat 2px bars in silence, clean return to 'Dictate' on stop.
Two live-verified Deepgram facts from the first real mic-test round:
- /v1/auth/grant returns { access_token }, not { token } — the route now
parses the right field.
- Minted JWTs authenticate over the WebSocket via the "bearer"
subprotocol; ["token", jwt] is rejected at the handshake (token is
for raw API keys only, as in the pi dictate extension).
Also documents the env-precedence gotcha in docs/research/stt.md: a
DEEPGRAM_API_KEY exported in the shell (e.g. .zshrc) silently beats
.env.local in next dev and the desktop authEnv() seam.
Two-band architecture from docs/research/stt.md: renderer captures mic
audio in an AudioWorklet (linear16 16kHz mono, ~128ms frames, per-quantum
RMS for the meter) and streams it directly to Deepgram over WebSocket —
audio never loops through our server. The real key stays server-side;
/api/stt/token mints a short-lived grant token (TTL 300s) per run.
Patterns ported from the owner's pi dictate extension (tuned in real
use): generation counter guarding every async handler, the
latest-RMS-never-resets meter (-50..-10dB window, 60ms tick), mic-first
stop + CloseStream + 3s safety net, endpointing=300 with the
utterance_end_ms=1000 backstop.
UI (owner placement): mic button in the stats bar's middle slot on all
three surfaces (home graph-view, chat, draft); while recording the meter
unfurls to fill the row's free width with the interim ghost at its
flank. Esc ends dictation from the composer. Token mint comes before
getUserMedia so a keyless app fails fast without a TCC prompt; one
automatic reconnect on abnormal socket close, errors surface inline.
Live-smoked the full error path in the dev shell (bar renders on all
three pages, 403 grant failure shows inline, mic untouched). The full
audio path needs a Deepgram key with Member permission to mint tokens.
amosblomqvist