Appendix

Non-normative. This document is a companion to the formal specifications. It records design rationale, comparisons with other systems, the catalogue of deliberate divergences from the reference implementation, and implementer-facing reference material that does not belong in a normative specification body. Nothing here is binding — the normative documents are the specifications listed in the README spec registry.

Pointers to specific reference-implementation code (file paths, class names, function names) and to specific real projects are deliberately kept out of the spec bodies and collected here, because implementation code moves and specifications must not.

The appendix is organized into topic-specific files:

File	Section	Topic
appendix/overview.md	§1	About the specifications — voice OS concept, formalization, stack taxonomy, compatibility, reference implementations
appendix/comparisons.md	§2	Comparison with other voice-assistant systems — HA/Rhasspy, Rasa, ASK/Dialogflow, summary
appendix/patterns.md	§3	Architectural patterns — bus substrate, pipeline-plugin model, interop with external protocols
appendix/rationale.md	§4	Design rationale, per specification — why each spec makes its choices
appendix/divergences.md	§5	Where the specs differ from the reference implementation — divergences, renames, topic mapping
appendix/reference.md	§6	Implementer reference — session-field cheat-sheet, stamp rules, introspection patterns
appendix/gaps.md	§7	Known gaps — deferred specs, tooling, corpora
appendix/persona-flow.md	§8	Persona lifecycle — annotated bus sequences for summon, conversation, dismiss, and out-of-band query
appendix/versioning.md	§9	Spec versioning policy — the V0/V1/V2 compatibility classes and the 1.0 release criterion