Built a hands-free voice panel for the Copilot CLI (canvas) — feedback on mic/Web Speech support

[aasis21]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Copilot CLI

Body

I built an open-source extension called Vox on the Copilot CLI + canvas surface (createCanvas / joinSession), and wanted to share it here as a bit of a show-and-tell plus some genuine product feedback about building voice UIs on this surface.

What it does: run /vox in a Copilot CLI session and a reactive orb opens in its own window — you speak your turn, the active session hears it, and the reply is read back to you. Voice in, voice out. It also renders inside the Copilot app's canvas panel. Extras: barge-in (Esc / tap the orb to interrupt), live captions, it reads your typed replies aloud too, and it routes across multiple live sessions.

The interesting constraint (and the feedback): the browser Web Speech APIs (SpeechRecognition / speechSynthesis) are the zero-dependency way to get speech-to-text + text-to-speech, but they don't work in Electron or most native webviews — which is where a canvas panel effectively runs. My workaround was to not use the webview for audio: I launch an installed Chromium in app mode (--app=, Chrome then Edge fallback) under a dedicated --user-data-dir profile that remembers the mic permission. Real Chrome under the hood → the speech APIs just work, and the whole thing stays pure JS with no build step and a one-line install on Win/macOS/Linux.

Things I'd love guidance or discussion on:

• Any current or planned way for a canvas extension to request microphone + speech access directly, so an external app-mode Chrome wouldn't be needed?
• Recommended patterns for a canvas panel that must persist across turns and route across multiple concurrent sessions.

Repo (MIT): https://github.com/aasis21/vox
Demo/site: https://aasis21.github.io/vox/

I'm the author — happy to share implementation details, and very open to feedback on the approach.

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