kandev-plugin-voice

Voice Mode for kandev: dictate a prompt into any native composer instead of typing it.

The microphone button appears beside the existing composer controls in task chat, Quick Chat, task creation and new-session creation, on desktop and on a phone. Speak, and the transcript is inserted at your cursor. kandev keeps ownership of the draft and of submission throughout — the plugin never builds or sends a message itself.

Press it and it records; press again and the transcript lands at the caret.

This plugin was extracted from kandev core, which shipped Voice Mode until the composer capability and authenticated-webhook host APIs made a standalone plugin possible.

Engines

Three recognizers, picked automatically or chosen per user in Settings → Plugins → Voice Mode:

Engine	Where the audio goes	Trade-off
Browser speech	The browser vendor's servers	Fastest, free, no download. Chromium only.
In-browser Whisper	Nowhere: it stays on the device	Fully private. Downloads a 40–240 MB model once, then a few seconds per recording.
Server transcription	Your kandev server, which relays it to OpenAI	Most accurate, works in every browser. Needs an operator API key and is billed per minute.

Automatic picks the first of those the browser can run, in that order. A pinned engine that turns out to be unusable degrades the same way rather than leaving a dead button.

Setup

1. Install the plugin (Settings → Plugins → Install, or the tarball upload below). It requires kandev 0.87.0 or newer.
2. Optional: paste an OpenAI API key into the plugin's settings form to enable the server engine for everyone on the install. Without it, the two browser engines still work and no audio ever reaches your server.
3. Each user picks their engine, language, activation style and auto-send under Settings → Plugins → Voice Mode. Those preferences are per-user, not shared.

The key is an operator setting, rendered by kandev from the manifest's config_schema and stored in its encrypted vault. It never reaches the browser: the plugin's Go half relays the audio server-side.

Everything below that is per-user, and every control explains what it changes and what it costs:

The dictation shortcut defaults to Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+M and is rebindable under Settings → Keyboard shortcuts like any other kandev shortcut. It is one of the few plugin bindings that fires while a composer has focus (manifest allow_in_editor), because dictating into the field you are typing in is the entire point.

On a phone

Same capability, same composer, a 40px touch target. Hold-to-talk silently becomes press-to-toggle on a coarse pointer, because the platform reclaims a held finger for system gestures mid-sentence; your saved preference is left alone so docking a keyboard restores it.

Privacy and cost

• Browser speech streams audio to the browser vendor. Chromium sends it to Google.
• In-browser Whisper downloads model weights from the Hugging Face CDN on first use and then runs entirely offline. No audio leaves the device.
• Server transcription uploads the recording to this plugin's authenticated transcribe webhook, which relays it to OpenAI with the operator's key and returns only the text. The key never reaches the browser, the webhook rejects anonymous callers, and an upstream error is never echoed back to the page.
• Nothing is stored. The plugin keeps no recordings, no transcripts and no history; its only persisted data is your per-user preferences.

Repository layout

kandev-plugin-voice/
├── manifest.yaml         # id, capabilities, webhook, keybinding, config schema
├── server/               # Go: the transcribe webhook and the OpenAI relay
└── ui/
    ├── src/              # TypeScript: engines, composer action, settings page
    ├── build.mjs         # esbuild: bundle.js + whisper-worker.js
    └── plugin.css        # plugin-owned styling (see the note below)

The UI ships its own CSS rather than using kandev's Tailwind utilities: Tailwind v4 only compiles classes it finds while scanning kandev's own sources, so a utility that works today would break the moment kandev deletes its last use of it.

Development

The Go half builds against kandev's pkg/pluginsdk, which is not published as a standalone module yet, so go.mod resolves it through a sibling checkout:

parent/
├── kandev/                 # github.com/kdlbs/kandev
└── kandev-plugin-voice/    # this repo

make ui-install       # once: install the UI toolchain
make test             # Go tests + UI tests
make typecheck        # tsc over ui/src
make package-host     # build a tarball for this platform only

Install the result into a disposable kandev instance:

curl -F package=@kandev-plugin-voice-0.1.0.tar.gz \
  http://localhost:8080/api/plugins/install

kandev rejects reinstalling the same id and version, so bump manifest.yaml's version (and the Makefile's VERSION) or uninstall first.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.