MCP Voice Summary

MCP Voice Summary Server

A local MCP server that reads out loud a summary of the actions an AI assistant just performed on your code. Built as an accessibility layer: you hear what the agent did without having to read the full response.

Speaks in the user's language automatically, with female and male voices, and works fully offline if you want it to.

Quick start

pip install mcp-voice-summary

Then point your MCP client at the installed command. For Claude Desktop, Cursor or Cline, in claude_desktop_config.json:

{

"mcpServers": { "voice-summary": { "command": "mcp-voice-summary", "env": { "VOICE_ENGINE": "edge", "VOICE_LANGUAGE": "es", "VOICE_GENDER": "male" } } } }

No env block is needed at all: the server picks the voice from your system language. The values above only pin it.

With uvx, without installing anything:

{

"mcpServers": { "voice-summary": { "command": "uvx", "args": ["mcp-voice-summary"], "env": { "VOICE_ENGINE": "edge" } } } }

This server is also listed in the MCP Registry under io.github.eduplopez/mcp-voice-summary. The registry metadata lives in server.json in this repo.

It is also listed on mcprush, with install commands for several clients and its live security grade:

Then tell your assistant to use it, for example: *"After you finish a task, read a short summary out loud."*

Platform support

The edge engine needs an internet connection on every utterance, because the audio is generated by Microsoft's servers. The sapi5 engine is fully offline.

On Linux the audio player is detected automatically; install ffmpeg (which provides ffplay) or mpg123 if nothing is found.

Higher quality Windows voices, offline

Windows ships better voices than the three exposed by default, but hides them under a registry key SAPI5 does not read. Run this once as administrator:

powershell -Command "Start-Process powershell -Verb RunAs -ArgumentList '-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\register_voices_onecore.ps1'"

Afterwards Microsoft Laura and Microsoft Pablo become available to sapi5.

What it does

Exposes an MCP tool, speak_summary, which the assistant calls after modifying code, creating files or running commands.

The summary length is decided by the assistant based on how much work it did: a short sentence for a small change, or a fuller summary when the task was large or had several steps. See Controlling the summary length.

Playback is asynchronous: the tool queues the text and returns immediately, so speaking never blocks the assistant.

Requirements

• Python 3.10 or newer.
• Windows, Linux or macOS.

Only the sapi5 engine needs a system dependency (the native synthesizer). The edge engine needs nothing beyond Python.

Checking that it works

mcp-voice-summary

The server speaks over stdio, so you will see nothing in the console. That is correct: anything printed to stdout would break the protocol. Ctrl+C to stop.

For the offline engine, install its extra first:

pip install -e ".[sapi5]"

Configuration

Everything is controlled through environment variables.

VOICE_RATE and VOICE_VOLUME accept both an absolute notation (the SAPI5 scale, where 100 is normal) and a relative one (+10%, -15%). The server translates automatically into the format each engine requires.

After changing the configuration, restart the MCP client.

Languages

Nothing needs configuring for this to work in your language. The server picks the voice on its own. The precedence is:

1. VOICE_NAME, if set: it always wins as a manual override.
2. set_language, if the assistant called it during the session.
3. VOICE_LANGUAGE, if set in the configuration.
4. The operating system language.
5. English, as a last resort.

Changing language and gender

Permanently, in the configuration:

"environment": { "VOICE_LANGUAGE": "fr", "VOICE_GENDER": "male" }

Or at runtime, without editing anything. The user can ask in natural language and the assistant calls the tool:

set_language("en")             -> Language English (en), gender default

set_language("pt-BR", "male") -> Language Portuguese (pt), gender male set_language("", "f") -> keep the language, switch to a female voice set_language("system") -> back to the OS language set_language("", "any") -> back to the language default gender

A runtime change applies to the following utterances and lasts until the server restarts or the tool is called again with a different value.

Gender only works with the `edge` engine. SAPI5 does not expose the gender

of its voices, so with sapi5 the tool says so instead of pretending. Picking

a gender requires neural voices.

Automatic language detection

VOICE_LANGUAGE=auto makes the server infer the language from each summary's text.

Use this with caution. Language detection is not reliable on short text, and short summaries are the main use case of this project. Measured with real summaries:

Detectors return high confidence even when they are wrong, so the errors cannot be filtered out by probability. In short: detection works on long sentences and fails on short ones. For a fixed language, VOICE_LANGUAGE is always more reliable.

If langdetect is not installed, auto logs a warning and falls back to English. The other modes work without that dependency.

Coverage

The edge engine exposes 142 locales across 322 voices. These 34 languages have both a female and a male voice assigned:

(Short names; the exact identifiers carry the Neural suffix and can be seen with list_voices or python -m edge_tts --list-voices.)

Of the 142 locales, only 2 have a single gender: the Chinese dialects zh-CN-liaoning and zh-CN-shaanxi. If you ask for a gender that does not exist in the chosen locale, the server logs a warning and uses the available voice instead of going silent.

Languages without curated voices still work: the server searches the 322 voices for the first one matching the requested language and gender. For example, sw (Swahili) resolves to sw-KE-RafikiNeural.

If you request a specific regional variant it is respected, by gender too:

The sapi5 engine can only use voices installed on the system, so its language coverage is whatever your operating system provides, and it cannot pick gender. Windows ships with Spanish and English; other languages require adding voices.

Voices

Neural voices (edge engine)

Full catalog of all 322 voices:

python -m edge_tts --list-voices

The 45 Spanish voices include:

Native Windows voices (sapi5 engine)

Out of the box only three very basic voices are visible. Windows already ships better ones, such as Microsoft Laura and Microsoft Pablo, but registers them under the registry key Speech_OneCore, which SAPI5 does not read.

register_voices_onecore.ps1 copies those keys into the branch SAPI5 does read. Run it once from a PowerShell prompt as administrator:

powershell -Command "Start-Process powershell -Verb RunAs -ArgumentList '-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\register_voices_onecore.ps1'"

It is a read-only copy: no e