Telegram Voice Messaging Recovery

This skill exists to restore a known-good OpenClaw native voice messaging setup.

What it restores

• local faster-whisper transcription helper in ~/.openclaw/tts
• local Python virtualenv with faster-whisper, edge-tts, and soundfile
• helper scripts for local testing
• working OpenClaw config for native Telegram voice-note replies
• explicit bundled Microsoft speech plugin enablement

What it does not do

• It does not manually send Telegram voice messages itself.
• It does not replace OpenClaw native reply routing.
• It does not require a separate Azure TTS API key.

Known-good OpenClaw config

Keep the live routing in openclaw.json:

"messages": {
  "ackReactionScope": "group-mentions",
  "tts": {
    "auto": "inbound",
    "provider": "microsoft",
    "providers": {
      "microsoft": {
        "voice": "en-IE-ConnorNeural",
        "lang": "en-IE"
      }
    }
  }
}

And explicitly enable the bundled Microsoft plugin:

"plugins": {
  "entries": {
    "microsoft": {
      "enabled": true
    }
  }
}

Important note

edge is a legacy alias. Current OpenClaw normalizes that path to microsoft.

Required restart

After applying the config, do a real manual gateway restart.

A hot reload / SIGUSR1 is not enough if the Microsoft speech provider is stale or unregistered.

Files restored

• transcribe-audio
• voice_handler.py
• tts_edge_wrapper.py
• voice_integration.sh
• Python virtualenv with the required packages

Install

cd /root/.openclaw/workspace/skills/lessac_offline_voice_system
./scripts/install.sh

Verify

1. Test direct TTS.
2. Send a short Telegram voice note.
3. Confirm inbound transcription works.
4. Confirm outbound reply comes back as audio.

Failure signature this skill is meant to fix

• inbound transcription works
• outbound TTS reply fails
• direct TTS reports:
  • microsoft: no provider registered
  • openai: not configured