Voice has no CLI of its own. The Lattices CLI sends speech output commands through the Lattices core daemon. This page describes the commands that reach Voice and their playback behavior. For the full lats voice reference, including listening and spoken commands, see Lattices voice.

Request path

lats voice say "…"
  → Lattices core daemon   lattices.sock   voice.say
  → Voice.app              speech.sock   speech.enqueue

The CLI reads the capability token from ~/Library/Application Support/Speech/RPC/capability and sends it in the WebSocket handshake to the daemon. The daemon forwards output verbs only for clients that present the token.

In Voice 0.3.0 and Lattices 0.15.1, both hops use private Unix sockets, ~/.lattices/run/lattices.sock and ~/.lattices/run/speech.sock. The CLI finds them and their tokens for you. The command set does not change.

The CLI binary is also installed as lattices. Both names run the same commands.

Commands that reach Voice

Command	Daemon verb	Voice.app method	Result
`lats voice say <text> [--voice <id>] [--provider <id>] [--rate <n>]`	`voice.say`	`speech.enqueue`	The new job, with its id and state
`lats voice stop`	`voice.stop`	`speech.stop`	Queue status
`lats voice pause`	`voice.pause`	`speech.pause`	Queue status
`lats voice resume`	`voice.resume`	`speech.resume`	Queue status
`lats voice seek <seconds>`	`voice.seek`	`speech.seek`	Queue status
`lats voice skip`	`voice.skip`	`speech.next`	Queue status
`lats voice list`	`voice.list`	`speech.voices`	Voices, with availability
`lats voice select <voice> [--provider <id>]`	`voice.select`	`speech.preferredVoice.set`	The saved preference
`lats voice status`	`voice.status`	`speech.status`	Lattices listening state, plus a `helper` section with the Voice.app queue

Add --json to any command for machine-readable output.

lats voice listen, stopListening, simulate, and intents do not reach Voice. Lattices serves those commands itself.

Playback semantics

say queues. say returns when Voice.app accepts the job. The returned state reflects the job at that moment and is never completed. Jobs play in order.
The queue outlives the caller. A job keeps playing after the CLI process exits.
stop clears the queue. stop stops the active job and cancels every queued job.
skip keeps the queue. skip ends the active job and starts the next queued job.
pause, resume, and seek act on the active job only. pause fails with Nothing is playing when no job plays. resume fails with Nothing is paused when no job is paused. seek takes a position in seconds from the start of the job.
select sets a per-provider default. The voice applies to later say requests for that provider that name no voice.
--rate must be between 0.25 and 4.0. The default is 1.0.

lats voice stop stops speech output. lats voice stop does not stop voice capture. To stop capture, use lats voice stopListening.

Limits

Limit	Value
Text per job	8,000 characters
Jobs in the queue	32
Recent finished jobs kept in status	8

Errors

If Lattices cannot reach Voice.app, output commands fail with one of these codes. Lattices does not fall back to another voice.

Error code	Meaning	Recovery
`helper_not_installed`	Voice.app is not on this Mac.	In the Lattices menu, choose Apps › Voice › Install.
`helper_unreachable`	Voice.app is installed but not running.	Choose Apps › Voice › Open.
`helper_unauthorized`	Voice.app is running, but the client did not send the capability token.	Use `lats`, or send the token from your client. See API.
`voice_stop_changed`	`voice.stop` was called while Lattices was listening and nothing was speaking.	Use `lats voice stopListening` to stop capture.