The author introduces Cicero, an open-source project that provides self-hosted, bidirectional voice interaction for AI agents. Unlike one-way dictation tools, Cicero allows agents to speak back and call users via Telegram, keeping all audio local.
- It integrates with Hermes Agent and any system supporting the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), including Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini CLI.
- The project supports multiple profiles, allowing each agent instance to have its own TTS voice and personality.
- Implementation details reveal that streaming replies sentence-by-sentence achieves ~1s response times, while trimming silence from reference clips improves voice clone quality more than changing models.
- Effective barge-in functionality requires a speech detection model rather than simple energy-based voice activity detection to avoid false triggers from typing.
Cicero enables users to maintain privacy by running speech-to-text and text-to-speech locally while interacting with agents through audio calls or Telegram bots.