Friday

A pi package that adds a dedicated communications side panel. All conversation is routed to a separate tmux pane with typewriter effect, keeping your main window clean for code, diffs, and command output. Optionally enable text-to-speech and hands-free voice input via wake word detection.

Installation

pi install npm:pi-friday

Or from git:

pi install git:github.com/dantetekanem/friday

To try without installing:

pi -e npm:pi-friday

Requirements

Required (the extension will not load without these):

• tmux — pi already requires this
• perl — pre-installed on macOS

Optional — Voice output (TTS):

• piper-tts — pip3 install piper-tts
• sox — brew install sox (provides the play command)
• A Piper voice model in ~/.local/share/piper-voices/ (see Voices below)

Without piper-tts and sox, voice output is disabled. The panel still works for text.

Optional — Voice input (wake word + transcription):

• openwakeword — pip3 install openwakeword
• faster-whisper — pip3 install faster-whisper
• pyaudio — pip3 install pyaudio (requires brew install portaudio)
• sounddevice + numpy — pip3 install sounddevice numpy

Without these, the wake word listener (/friday listen, Alt+L) is unavailable.

Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Alt+Tab	Show/hide the Friday panel without restarting it; while hidden, assistant replies stay in the main window and are copied to the hidden panel
Alt+M	Toggle voice on/off
Alt+L	Toggle wake word listener on/off

Commands

Command	Action
/friday	Toggle the extension on/off
/friday voice	Toggle voice output
/friday listen	Toggle wake word listener
/friday settings	Show current configuration

The status bar shows active modes: FRIDAY, VOICE, DAEMON ON.

Programmatic Control

Friday registers a friday_control tool so agents can inspect or toggle the panel at runtime:

Tool action	Effect
status	Report whether Friday is active, suspended, or offline
disable	Close Friday panes, stop voice/wake services, and leave Friday inactive
enable	Re-enable Friday and reopen the panel when possible

Other extensions can toggle Friday through the shared event bus:

pi.events.emit("friday:disable", { source: "my-extension" });
pi.events.emit("friday:enable", { source: "my-extension" });
pi.events.emit("friday:set-enabled", { enabled: false, source: "my-extension" });

Remote-control suspension still takes priority. If Friday is enabled while remote control is active, it will become active after remote control releases it.

Friday Message Formatting

Friday keeps code, tables, diffs, command output, and other structured artifacts in the main Pi window. The side panel supports only a small set of optional inline tags for conversational emphasis:

Tag	Effect
<b>...</b> or <bold>...</bold>	Bold
<i>...</i> or <italic>...</italic>	Italic
<dim>...</dim>	Dim
<red>...</red>, <green>...</green>, <yellow>...</yellow>, <blue>...</blue>, <magenta>...</magenta>, <cyan>...</cyan>, <gray>...</gray>, <white>...</white>, <accent>...</accent>	Color

Use these tags sparingly in conversational panel messages only. Do not use them for code or main-window content.

Wake Word

Say the configured wake word (default: "hey friday") to activate hands-free voice input. After detection, Friday records your speech, transcribes it locally with faster-whisper, and sends it as a message to pi.

Friday looks for custom wake word models in ~/.pi/agent/friday/. To set up the default "hey friday" wake word:

1. Visit openwakeword.com/library (free, requires sign-in)
2. Search for "hey friday"
3. Download the .onnx file to ~/.pi/agent/friday/
4. Set wakeWord.model in settings.json to the filename without .onnx

You can use any custom wake word — just download its .onnx model to the same directory.

Built-in models (no download needed): alexa, hey_mycroft, hey_jarvis, hey_rhasspy, timer, weather.

Voices

Friday uses Piper for text-to-speech. The default voice is en_GB-jenny_dioco-medium (British female).

Install the default voice:

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/piper-voices
cd ~/.local/share/piper-voices
curl -sL -o en_GB-jenny_dioco-medium.onnx \
  "https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/resolve/v1.0.0/en/en_GB/jenny_dioco/medium/en_GB-jenny_dioco-medium.onnx"
curl -sL -o en_GB-jenny_dioco-medium.onnx.json \
  "https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices/resolve/v1.0.0/en/en_GB/jenny_dioco/medium/en_GB-jenny_dioco-medium.onnx.json"

Use a different voice:

Browse voices at rhasspy/piper/voices. Download the .onnx and .onnx.json files to ~/.local/share/piper-voices/, then set voice.model in settings.json to the model name (without .onnx).

Settings

Edit settings.json in this directory:

{
  "name": "Friday",
  "voice": {
    "enabled": false,
    "model": "en_GB-jenny_dioco-medium",
    "speed": 0.9
  },
  "wakeWord": {
    "enabled": false,
    "model": "hey_friday",
    "threshold": 0.3,
    "whisperModel": "tiny.en"
  },
  "typewriter": {
    "enabled": true
  },
  "panelWidth": 30
}

Setting	Description
name	Display name in status bar
voice.model	Piper voice model name (filename in ~/.local/share/piper-voices/ without .onnx)
voice.speed	Speech speed multiplier (0.9 = slightly slower)
wakeWord.model	openwakeword model name or custom .onnx filename without extension
wakeWord.threshold	Detection confidence (0.0-1.0, lower = more sensitive)
wakeWord.whisperModel	faster-whisper model size: tiny.en, base.en, small.en, medium.en
typewriter.enabled	Typewriter text effect in panel
panelWidth	Panel width as percentage of terminal

License

MIT