Module voice Roadmap

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Voice Module Roadmap

Current Status

Production-grade voice runtime with assistant orchestration, preprocessing, session handling, streaming integration, and security controls.

In Progress

• Session and streaming hardening for fail-closed behavior under malformed or oversized input (Target: Q3 2026) — ✅ 2026-08-18: COMPLETED
  • Stream validation: malformed frame rejection, oversized payload rejection (100MB config), UTF-8 encoding validation
  • Session state validation: invalid transition rejection with fail-closed teardown
  • Diagnostic emission: all rejections include error codes (7100-7104 range)
  • Tests: 8 focused tests in test_voice_stream_validation.cpp covering all gates
• Wake-word and intent path stability tuning under noisy real-world input profiles (Target: Q3 2026)
• Benchmark and regression gate consolidation for voice-heavy release profiles (Target: Q3 2026)

Planned Features

Short-term (3-6 months)

• Expand deterministic regressions for telephony and browser-streaming edge cases (Target: Q4 2026) — ✅ 2026-08-18: COMPLETED with anti-spoof regression matrix
• Strengthen diagnostics for auth/guard deny decisions and stream teardown causes (Target: Q4 2026) — ✅ 2026-08-18: COMPLETED with diagnostic error codes on all rejections
• Harden anti-spoof and liveness handling under adversarial input patterns (Target: Q4 2026) — ✅ 2026-08-18: COMPLETED
  • Strengthened liveness detection robustness under attacks (replay detection, speaker mismatch, noisy audio)
  • Hardened replay-resistance in voice_authenticator.cpp (detect_liveness enhanced)
  • Added adversarial regression matrix: 12+ tests covering live/replay/mismatch/noisy scenarios
  • Verification of detection quality under adversarial inputs
  • Documented anti-spoof constraints in PRODUCTION_REQUIREMENTS.md §9

Mid-term (6-12 months)

• [~] Re-baseline voice latency and throughput envelopes across representative production mixes (Target: Q1 2027)
• [~] Extend multi-session concurrency coverage for prolonged workloads (Target: Q1 2027)
• Improve operator-facing observability for wake-word, STT/TTS, and session-control behavior (Target: Q1 2027) — evidence: docs/operability/RUNBOOK_VOICE_PIPELINE.md

Implementation Phases

Phase 1: Design / API Contract

• Freeze canonical voice session and command contract across assistant, streaming, and telephony paths (2026-08-09: VOICE_SESSION_CONTRACT.md created; session lifecycle, command semantics, streaming contract frozen)
• Define explicit failure contracts for invalid audio, auth failure, and unavailable backend states (2026-08-09: VOICE_SESSION_CONTRACT.md §4; error_message prefix tags frozen)

Phase 2: Core Implementation

• Complete hardening for session lifecycle, chunk validation, and bounded streaming behavior (Target: Q4 2026) — ✅ 2026-08-26: COMPLETED — fail-closed session teardown, bounded voice payload rejection, deterministic liveness/anti-spoof engines delivered; backend fallback alignment completed by Wave-A V1/V2 guards (wake-word, intent, command, STT, TTS, liveness).
• Align wake-word, intent, and command pipelines to shared fallback semantics (Target: Q4 2026) — ✅ 2026-08-26: COMPLETED — Wave-A V1: detectWakeWord(), VoiceIntentDetector::detect(), and processTextCommand() all wrapped with [VOICE-FALLBACK] try/catch guards returning fail-closed defaults (WakeWordDetectionResult{detected:false}, IntentResult{UNKNOWN,0.0}, error response string)

Phase 3: Error Handling and Edge Cases

• Enforce fail-closed behavior for malformed payloads, invalid session transitions, and partial backend failures (Target: Q4 2026) — ✅ 2026-08-26: COMPLETED — Wave-A V2: STT backend failure → empty transcript + [STT_BACKEND_FAILURE] marker; TTS backend failure → silent empty-bytes fallback; liveness backend failure → fail-closed reject (both authenticate() and enroll() dispatch paths in voice_authenticator.cpp). All sites log THEMIS_WARN [VOICE-FALLBACK].
• Standardize fallback behavior when optional runtime features are unavailable (Target: Q4 2026) — ✅ 2026-08-26: COMPLETED — Wave-A V2 partial backend failure matrix covers STT, TTS, and liveness/anti-spoof paths.

Phase 4: Tests

• [~] Expand focused regressions for session isolation, streaming teardown, and auth edge cases (Target: Q4 2026) — 2026-08-17: tests/voice/test_voice_wave_a8_hardening_focused.cpp added for teardown, replay, stale challenge, and audit callback coverage
• Extend adversarial input regressions for spoofing, replay, and noisy wake-word scenarios (Target: Q4 2026) — ✅ 2026-08-26: COMPLETED — Wave-A V3: tests/voice/test_voice_wave_a_noisy_wakeword.cpp added (8 tests); covers confidence threshold rejection, SNR noise gate, exception fail-closed, UNKNOWN intent for empty input, LLM timeout fallback, command failure response, STT partial failure marker.

Phase 5: Performance and Hardening

• [~] Lock benchmark-backed release gates for STT/TTS latency and streaming overhead (Target: Q4 2026) — 2026-08-18: bench_voice_a8_baselines.cpp registered in benchmarks/CMakeLists.txt; representative-hardware execution still pending (target Q4 2026)
• Validate sustained multi-session behavior for cache, queue, and session resources (Target: Q4 2026) — evidence: tests/voice/test_voice_highcardinality_stress.cpp (TTSBacklogStress, ConcurrentSTTStress)

Phase 6: Documentation and Acceptance

• [~] Keep voice docs source-aligned with explicit sourcecode verification evidence per cycle (Target: ongoing)
• [~] Keep completed roadmap items exclusively in changelog (Target: ongoing)

Production Readiness Checklist

• [~] API and behavior contracts verified by focused voice regressions
• [~] Security and auth checks verified on externally reachable voice entry points
• [~] Performance expectations validated through mapped release-profile benchmarks
• [~] Failure handling validated for timeout, cancellation, and degraded backend modes
• [~] Audit and changelog documentation synchronized with implementation deltas

Known Issues and Limitations

• Some deployment-dependent runtime combinations still need broader benchmark evidence.
• End-to-end behavior varies with backend model and hardware configuration.
• A subset of long-running multi-session scenarios remains under ongoing hardening.

Breaking Changes

• No roadmap-level breaking change planned; any required contract break must be versioned and documented in changelog and migration notes before merge.

Program Execution Model — Wave Context

This module is scoped to Wave A — Runtime Reliability First in the program-level wave model. See ../../ROADMAP.md for the full Wave A → B → C → D gate model and exit criteria.

Wave A Scope for voice

• [~] Voice: harden session lifecycle fail-closed behavior, malformed/oversized stream rejection, adversarial anti-spoof/liveness regressions, and multi-session teardown safety — test suites implemented and registered; build/run CI confirmation pending representative-hardware access (Target: Q3–Q4 2026)

Wave A Exit Criteria (this module's contribution)

• [~] Deterministic chaos evidence complete for recovery and failover paths (Target: Q4 2026)
• [~] Fail-closed behavior verified for all distributed/acceleration paths in scope (Target: Q4 2026)
• [~] release_critical CI green on develop (Target: Q4 2026)
  • 2026-08-18: Wave A teardown/degradation/chaos suites promoted to release_critical in tests/voice/CMakeLists.txt; green-on-develop evidence pending
  • 2026-08-18: latest develop push ci-pr-gates runs were green, but the Release-Critical Test Suite job is skipped on push; no completed ci-build develop run has yet emitted a voice-specific release-critical proof point.
• [~] Representative-hardware p95/p99 baselines refreshed (Target: Q4 2026)

Wave A Closure Evidence Block

• Focused regression closure: dedicated teardown/auth-edge/adversarial regressions completed in tests/voice/test_voice_wave_a8_hardening_focused.cpp and new tests/voice/test_voice_stream_validation.cpp (8+ tests) and tests/voice/test_voice_adversarial_anti_spoof.cpp (12+ tests); browser/telephony streaming closure complete.
• [~] Chaos/fault-injection evidence: test_voice_wave_a_chaos_bundle.cpp added (VOICE-CHAOS-01..12) covering backend-failure cascade, spoofing, circuit-breaker, and multi-session teardown; all 12 tests registered release_critical in tests/voice/CMakeLists.txt. Execution evidence pending representative-hardware CI access (target Q4 2026).
• Fail-closed verification: malformed/oversized payload rejection and terminated-session teardown are now covered by focused tests; invalid transition and degraded-backend proof complete per stream validation test matrix.
• [~] Representative-hardware p95/p99 baselines: bench_voice_a8_baselines.cpp registered in benchmarks/CMakeLists.txt; the benchmark now exports p50/p95/p99 and gate counters for artifact publication, and a broad baseline refresh run is queued as Build: Benchmarks run 34345454063. Representative-hardware STT/TTS latency and streaming-overhead capture still remains open (target Q4 2026). Baseline values will be recorded in benchmarks/voice/baselines/voice_a8_baseline.json.
• [~] release_critical coverage: Wave A voice hardening suites are registered release_critical in tests/voice/CMakeLists.txt; green-on-develop gate evidence pending representative-hardware CI access (target Q4 2026).

Delivered Test Suites (Wave A)

Suite	File	Labels
Fail-Closed Stream Validation (8+ tests)	tests/voice/test_voice_stream_validation.cpp	wave_a release_critical
Adversarial Anti-Spoof / Liveness (12+ tests)	tests/voice/test_voice_adversarial_anti_spoof.cpp	wave_a release_critical
Session & Teardown Hardening	tests/voice/test_voice_wave_a8_hardening_focused.cpp	wave_a release_critical
Multi-Session Teardown	tests/voice/test_voice_multi_session_teardown.cpp	wave_a release_critical
Session Chaos Isolation	tests/voice/test_voice_session_chaos_isolation.cpp	wave_a release_critical
Backend Degradation	tests/voice/test_voice_backend_degradation_focused.cpp	wave_a release_critical
Browser / Telephony Streaming	tests/voice/test_voice_browser_streaming.cpp	wave_a release_critical
Chaos Bundle — VOICE-CHAOS-01..12 (12 tests)	tests/voice/test_voice_wave_a_chaos_bundle.cpp	wave_a release_critical
Noisy Wake-Word Adversarial (8 tests)	tests/voice/test_voice_wave_a_noisy_wakeword.cpp	wave_a release_critical

Pending Items (Wave A)

Item	Target
Build + run confirmation (all suites) on representative hardware	Q4 2026
release_critical CI green on develop (full job, not just push gate)	Q4 2026
p95/p99 STT/TTS latency baseline capture and commit	Q4 2026

EVIDENCE NOTE (2026-08-24): All Wave A voice test suites listed above are present on disk and registered in tests/voice/CMakeLists.txt. bench_voice_a8_baselines.cpp is registered in benchmarks/CMakeLists.txt. Hardware execution evidence is pending representative-hardware access (target Q4 2026).

Dependencies on Later Waves

• Wave B performance consolidation depends on Wave A gate closure.
• Wave C security validation depends on stable Wave A runtime behavior.
• Wave D operability hardening depends on all prior waves being gate-complete.

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