Summary

gaia talk has two distinct problems that prevent it from working in common configurations, particularly when using a remote Lemonade Server or on Windows systems with typical microphone hardware.

Problem 1: Stuck in "Listening" mode, never detects speech

Observed behavior: Running gaia talk shows the "Listening" spinner indefinitely. Speech is never detected regardless of how loudly the user speaks.

Root cause: The voice activity detection (VAD) thresholds in AudioClient are set far more aggressively than the underlying AudioRecorder defaults:

The AudioClient silence threshold is 3.3x higher than the recorder default, meaning audio must be 3.3x louder to be detected as speech. Many Windows microphones produce audio levels below 0.01, so the system never triggers.

Impact: There is no user-visible diagnostic information during this failure:

• No microphone device name is shown at startup
• No audio level feedback while listening
• No warning when extended listening produces no detected speech
• The user has no way to tell if the microphone is working, too quiet, or misconfigured

Affected files:

• src/gaia/audio/audio_client.py

Problem 2: No CLI option to adjust microphone sensitivity

Observed behavior: Users with quiet microphones or noisy environments have no way to adjust the voice detection amplitude threshold without modifying source code.

Impact: Even if a user discovers that their microphone levels are too low for the default threshold, there is no --silence-threshold or equivalent CLI flag on gaia talk to tune the sensitivity. This forces users to either modify source code or accept that gaia talk will not work with their hardware.

Affected files:

• src/gaia/cli.py (talk command argument parsing)
• src/gaia/talk/sdk.py (TalkSDK configuration)
• src/gaia/audio/audio_client.py (AudioClient configuration)

Environment

• OS: Windows 11
• Python: 3.10+
• GAIA version: main branch (commit 05b6fda)