Hands-Free Voice Mode

Hands-free mode listens for the beginning and the end of your speech, so you talk, the assistant answers, and you talk again — without touching the screen between turns.

Voice activity detection, on the phone

The part that decides "someone is speaking now" is a small on-device detector. That detail is the whole feature. An always-listening assistant that decides in the cloud has to stream audio to the cloud to make the decision, which means a microphone feed leaving your phone continuously. Here, the deciding happens locally, and only speech that was detected is handed to Whisper — which also runs locally. No audio leaves the device at any point in the chain.

What it feels like

You speak. It stops recording when you stop, transcribes, generates, and reads the answer back with text-to-speech. Then it listens again. Useful while driving, cooking, walking, working with your hands, or for anyone who finds a phone keyboard slow.

What it costs the battery

Continuous listening plus repeated generation is the most expensive thing this app does, and BatteryGuard knows it. As the battery falls or the phone warms up, the thread budget narrows; below its threshold, heavy work stops and says so in plain words rather than quietly getting slower until you notice. If you intend a long hands-free session, plug in — and the app will tell you that rather than making you guess.