Symon
o8's voice operator — talk to o8 and it talks back, takes action by voice, and still stops for your yes on anything irreversible.
Symon is o8's voice operator — you talk to o8, it talks back, and it can take real actions on your Mac and inside o8 by voice. It's a distinct surface from the orchestrator: where the orchestrator dispatches the coding fleet and gates merges, Symon is the fast, hands-free plane you drive the room from. macOS only.
The rule that makes voice safe: Symon never gets a private back door around governance. Every action with a side effect runs through the same approval gate as everything else in o8.
Talking to it
Two ways to converse, and they differ under the hood:
- Push-to-talk (the default, shipped). Hold a key, speak a request, release. Symon runs a fast reasoning loop, takes the action or answers, and speaks the result back. Conversational in feel, turn-based in mechanism.
- Realtime voice-to-voice (opt-in). A continuous mode where your speech and Symon's stream live, with the same native tools bridged in behind the same gate. It's a secondary track you turn on — a free local default with an opt-in realtime mode — not what runs out of the box.
Either way, the tools and the safety gate are identical. A destructive action spoken into a live conversation still stops for your yes.
Talking back
Symon speaks — confirmations, results, and answers read aloud. Out of the box it uses the built-in macOS voice (no key, no network); higher-quality voices light up only if you configure them. It works two directions: you ask it a question by voice and it answers (in the floating dock as text, and spoken back), and when it wants to do something that needs your go-ahead, it speaks the proposed action and waits for your confirmation.
The governance posture
Voice can observe and act on low-risk things freely, but the irreversible stuff always stops for a yes. Symon sorts every action into three tiers:
| Tier | Examples | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Read-only | search, list, read, open an app | runs on its own, no prompt |
| Reversible | create a reminder, event, or note | confirmed by default |
| Destructive / high-impact | send mail, delete, run a Shortcut — and on the code plane, merges, pushes, migrations, spend | always raises a confirmation card; you can't suppress it |
Two fail-safes back this up: anything Symon doesn't recognize is treated as destructive (it asks), and a hard never-do list — shell, sudo, keychain, credentials, secrets, system paths — is refused outright, not even gated. For a gated action it speaks the proposal, shows an Allow/Cancel card, and waits; no answer within the window means declined.
Direct your work by voice — and the irreversible stuff still stops for your yes. Voice inherits o8's "nothing merges unreviewed" gate; it doesn't route around it.
For the hands-free text-input and command grammar, see Dictation & say-commands.