The /converse turn synthesised the entire reply before any audio played, so
time-to-first-audio grew with reply length. Add a streaming /converse_stream
endpoint that emits the transcript/reply first, then one audio clip per
sentence as each finishes synthesising. The Discord voice layer enqueues each
clip on arrival via the existing FIFO playQueue, so the first sentence starts
speaking while the rest are still being synthesised.
STT and the reply engine still run to completion before the first clip; only
TTS is pipelined. The non-streaming /converse and /text endpoints are
unchanged.
- bridge: language-agnostic sentence splitter (bridge/text_utils.py) + NDJSON
streaming route
- bot: ndjson() reader + converseStream() client; voice.ts plays clips
progressively
- tests: splitter unit tests + bot ndjson/converseStream tests
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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