Voice

You can talk to C5 instead of typing, and you can have it read replies out loud. Both are optional. Neither does anything until you turn it on.

Look for the small microphone at the left of the box where you type. It appears wherever you would write something in your own words:

Where	Which boxes
Chat	The message box
Schedules	Title, description, and instructions
Tasks	Title, description, and your reasoning

Click the microphone, say what you want, and click it again to stop. Your words appear in the box as text, where you can read them and fix anything before you send.

You will not find a microphone on a date picker or on a field that wants a web address. Saying a GitHub URL aloud is slower than typing it and far easier to get wrong, so those fields are left alone deliberately.

Tip The text stays in the box until you send it. That pause is deliberate — read it back before pressing enter, especially if you are asking for something you cannot undo.

Knowing it is listening #

While you are recording, a ring around the microphone grows and shrinks with your voice. It is driven by what the microphone is actually picking up, not by a timer — so if the ring sits still while you are talking, the microphone is not hearing you, and that is worth knowing before you speak a paragraph into nothing.

C5 releases the microphone shortly after you stop. Your computer's own "microphone in use" indicator goes out at that point, and the next time you click, C5 picks it up again.

You do not have to turn it on #

The two built-in options are already on. You only need the Voice tab if you want a paid provider, or if you want to turn the built-in ones off.

Nothing listens until you press a microphone. Being switched on only means the free engine is there when you do.

The built-in option #

Built-in (on-device) turns your speech into text using your own computer. Nothing is sent anywhere. It works with no internet connection at all — it is the only option that does.

It needs a one-time download of about 60 MB, and C5 starts fetching it in the background the first time it boots after an update. You do not have to do anything, and you can carry on working while it downloads. The built-in row on the Voice tab shows the progress, and says when the model is ready.

If you would rather fetch it yourself, or the automatic download could not reach the network:

bash

growther voice pull

Built-in (this browser) reads replies aloud using a voice your computer already has. It needs no download at all and is ready immediately. Nothing leaves your machine, and it costs nothing.

Note The offline option understands English only. If you speak another language, you will want one of the paid providers below, which all handle many languages.

Which one gets tried first #

Both lists are an order, not a set. C5 works down from the top and stops at the first provider that answers, so the arrows beside each row decide what happens when one is unavailable — a provider that is down, out of credit, or simply switched off is skipped rather than being an error you have to deal with.

Put the built-in option last and you have a free fallback that works with no internet. Put it first and nothing you say ever leaves the machine unless the offline engine fails outright.

The paid options #

OpenAI, Groq, xAI (Grok), OpenRouter and ElevenLabs all do a better job than the built-in option, and all of them handle many languages. They are more accurate, and the voices sound far more natural.

They work by sending your audio to that company. You will need an account with them.

Two switches that change how the microphone behaves #

They sit at the top of the Voice tab and apply everywhere the microphone appears.

Auto-volume evens out how loud you are, so speaking quietly or sitting back from the microphone still produces a usable recording. It is on to begin with. It makes no difference to how accurately your words are transcribed — that was measured, not assumed — but it does keep a quiet voice above the threshold where C5 decides a recording is silence and discards it. Turn it off if you would rather the ring tracked how loudly you are actually speaking.

Tap-and-hold changes the microphone from a switch into a button: hold it down while you talk, let go when you finish. It is off to begin with, and it behaves the same whether you use a mouse or a touchscreen. Dragging away before you let go throws the recording away, which is useful when you change your mind mid-sentence.

Note Tap-and-hold applies to the mouse and to touch. A keyboard has no way to hold a button in any meaningful sense, so pressing space or enter on the microphone still starts and stops the way it always did. Nothing becomes unreachable if you turn this on.

Adding a key for a paid provider #

Voice keys live in your configuration file rather than being typed into the app:

text

~/.growther/config/c5.yaml

Open it in a text editor and add the key for the provider you want. The Voice tab tells you the exact name to use for each one, and shows whether it is set yet.

Save the file, and the Voice tab updates on its own. You do not need to restart C5 or reload the page.

See Configuration files for more about c5.yaml.

Warning Treat an API key like a password. Anyone who has it can spend money on your account.

What actually leaves your computer #

This is worth being clear about, because the answer depends entirely on which option you picked.

Option	What leaves your computer
Built-in (on-device)	Nothing at all
Built-in (this browser)	Nothing at all
Any paid provider	The audio you recorded, or the text you asked to be read out

Three things are true whichever you choose:

Your recordings are never saved. C5 turns them into text and throws the audio away. It is not written to your database, your logs, or your disk.
Your keys never reach your browser. C5 talks to providers from your own machine.
The words are never recorded anywhere. C5 keeps track of which provider answered and how long it took, so you can see what things cost. What you actually said is not part of that.

If you use a paid provider, that company's own terms decide what they do with the audio you send them. C5 cannot promise anything on their behalf. That is exactly why the offline option exists.

Keeping the cost down #

Paid providers charge by the minute of audio, or by the number of characters they read out. C5 works out what a request will cost before making it, and refuses if it would take you over your monthly voice budget.

You set that limit in Settings → Budget, in the Voice Spending Limit panel, alongside C5's other spending controls. It works the same way as the hard budget cap: a switch, an amount, and a choice of whether the allowance resets daily, weekly, monthly or yearly — on the day you pick, not on an arbitrary one. See Budgets & costs for the rest.

Two things save you money without any effort:

Silence is never sent. If you start recording and say nothing, C5 notices and throws the recording away. There is nothing to pay for.
The offline option is free, and it is never counted against your budget — even if you have used the rest of it up.

Reading replies out loud #

Hover over any reply and press the speaker button.

If you would rather not press it each time, the megaphone switch on the right-hand edge of the chat reads every new reply aloud as it arrives. It is off to begin with, and C5 remembers your choice in this browser — turning it off in one window turns it off everywhere.

Note Auto-speak starts from the next reply, not the one already on screen. Turning it on and waiting at a finished conversation will look like nothing happened; send something and it will speak.

The built-in browser voice costs nothing and works offline, but it sounds like your computer. A paid provider sounds far more natural and charges per character.

Tip Think about where you are before you turn auto-speak on. A long reply narrating itself in an open-plan office is the reason this is off by default.

Voice notes from Slack, Discord and Teams #

If someone sends C5 a voice note on a chat platform you have connected, it is transcribed the same way, using the same providers and the same budget. There is nothing extra to set up.

You can turn this off for a specific platform in Settings → Communications, using the Voice/Audio switch. When it is off, C5 does not download the voice note at all.

Note A voice note has nobody to check it. When you dictate, you see the text and can fix it before sending — a voice note goes straight to your agent as though you had typed it. For anything important, dictate rather than sending a note.

If something is not working #

There is no microphone button, or C5 says it needs a secure connection.

Your browser only allows the microphone when the address bar shows localhost or an https:// address. If you reached C5 using an address like 192.168.1.50 or my-mac.local, the browser blocks the microphone and there is nothing C5 can do about it. Connect through an SSH tunnel and open http://localhost instead.

C5 says no speech-to-text provider is set up.

If you have just updated, the built-in engine is probably still downloading — it is switched on, but its model has not arrived yet. C5 will say so rather than this if it knows a download is in flight; check the Voice tab, which shows the progress. Wait for it to finish and try again.

Otherwise you have turned the built-in option off and have not added a key. Turn it back on in Settings → Voice, run growther voice pull, or add a key to c5.yaml.

Dictation keeps coming back empty.

C5 throws away recordings that are too quiet to contain speech. Check that the right microphone is selected and that it is not muted. Watch the ring while you talk — if it does not move, the microphone is not reaching C5, and no provider will fix that.

If you turned auto-volume off, a quiet or distant voice is more likely to fall below the threshold. Turning it back on is the quickest test.

The reply is not read aloud even though the megaphone is on.

Auto-speak starts from the next reply, not the one already on screen. Send something and it will speak.

If it stays silent after that, your browser may be refusing to play audio on a page you have not interacted with yet — clicking anywhere in the page and sending again resolves it. Pressing the speaker button on a reply is unaffected, because pressing it is itself the interaction.

Voice stopped working after an update.

Run this and read both lines:

bash

growther doctor

It tells you two separate things: whether the offline engine can run on your computer, and whether the model has been downloaded. They are different problems with different fixes.

You want to remove the downloaded model.

growther uninstall --purge-data removes it along with everything else C5 stores.