LightVoice

June — a voice assistant for the Light Phone III. Hold a key, say what you want, and it happens: alarms, timers, reminders, calls, iMessages, notes, plain questions. Package com.gios.lightvoice, arm64, minSdk 29. Current released version: v1.0.7.

The assistant is named June (renamed from "Assistant" in v1.0.5); the repo and package keep the LightVoice name on purpose, since changing the package would make Android treat it as a different app and break Obtainium updates.

Why this exists

LightOS has no Google Play Services, so the two platform building blocks a voice assistant would normally reach for don't exist: android.speech.SpeechRecognizer has no provider to bind to, and android.speech.tts has no engine installed. Both ends of the loop — speech in and the spoken response out — have to be cloud services, for that reason:

1. Capture — AudioRecord straight to 16 kHz mono WAV, with a level meter and end-of-speech detection, so releasing the key early still works.
2. Transcribe — Groq whisper-large-v3-turbo (/openai/v1/audio/transcriptions). Contact names are passed as the decoder's prompt, which is what turns "text Alec" into the right person.
3. Decide — Claude Haiku, using tool use rather than regex, one round trip.
4. Do — the app performs the action itself and composes the confirmation from what actually happened, so it can never claim an alarm is set when it isn't.
5. Speak — Groq playai-tts by default (one key covers both directions, though its terms need accepting once in the Groq console), or OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-tts. Turn speech off and replies stay text-only.

Roughly, per request: a fifth of a cent to transcribe, a fifth to decide, a similar amount again to speak — under half a cent a question with speech off.

Quick start

1. Install the APK from Releases or track the repo in Obtainium — CI releases only on pushes to main (see Building).
2. Open June → SETUP and add a Groq key and an Anthropic key. Typing those on a 3.9-inch keyboard is miserable, so open gi-os.github.io/LightVoice on a computer, fill the form in, and scan the QR on the phone instead.
3. Optional: add a BlueBubbles URL and password, then SYNC CONTACTS to pull the Mac's address book.
4. Grant the permissions on first launch: microphone, contacts, phone, notifications.
5. Say something — hold the on-screen circle or, once wired up (below), a hardware key.

Say	What happens
"Wake me at seven"	Alarm at 07:00, rung by this app
"Alarm for six thirty on weekdays"	Repeating alarm, Mon–Fri
"Timer for ten minutes"	Countdown, full-screen ring
"Remind me to call the landlord at four"	Reminder with the text on screen
"What's set?" / "Cancel everything"	Reads back or clears the schedule
"Call Alex"	Dials from the merged address book
"Text Alex I'm running late"	Real iMessage through your BlueBubbles server
"Note that the rent is due Friday"	Saved to Notes
"How long does a hard-boiled egg take?"	Answered in a sentence, spoken aloud

Configuration and usage

Push-to-talk from anywhere

The in-app circle needs no setup. To open the mic from anywhere on the phone, including a locked screen:

# 1. Turn the accessibility service on. LightOS has no Settings UI for this list,
#    so it's set directly.
adb shell settings put secure enabled_accessibility_services \
  com.gios.lightvoice/com.gios.lightvoice.ptt.PttService
adb shell settings put secure accessibility_enabled 1

# 2. Let it open a window while the screen is off or locked. On Android 14 this
#    appop is the background-activity-start exemption, not an overlay grant.
adb shell appops set com.gios.lightvoice SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW allow

Then enable Hardware key in SETUP. It binds to volume-up by default; Learn a key captures any other, including the LPIII's custom button, which reports a code of its own.

The bound key keeps working. A key-down is never swallowed — only a deliberate half-second hold opens the mic, and only the release of that hold is consumed — so a short press still changes the volume exactly as before. Worst case if anything misbehaves is one unwanted volume step; the service can't trap the user.

To undo it: adb shell settings put secure enabled_accessibility_services "". That empties the same list BrightControl's setup writes to, so if both are installed, colon-join both components instead of running either setup command alone:

adb shell settings put secure enabled_accessibility_services \
  com.gios.lightvoice/com.gios.lightvoice.ptt.PttService:com.gios.lightcontrol/com.gios.lightcontrol.keys.ControlService

The wheel

Turning the wheel scrolls whatever list is on screen — ALARMS, NOTES, or the SETUP page — with nothing installed but June. LightOS relabels the wheel sensor's two scancodes in /system/usr/keylayout/Generic.kl, and nothing intercepts them, so they reach the focused window as ordinary key events; MainActivity reads them in dispatchKeyEvent, early enough to beat the key-entry fields in SETUP (otherwise a turn there would type a letter). No service, no permission, no root. Notches are paid off a fraction per frame rather than applied as they arrive, since the sensor fires faster than the screen refreshes; the first notch after a pause waits for a second to confirm it, since the wheel sits under a thumb.

The wheel is deliberately not available as a push-to-talk key — the PTT service refuses it even if an older binding names one, because a turn is a scroll everywhere else on the phone, and binding it here would open the mic every time a list is read. Holding the wheel in, clicking it, and the camera button all do nothing in June; for those, BrightControl is the optional separate install that gives the whole phone brightness, flashlight and camera-button actions, each rebindable. It passes bare turns straight through to com.gios.*, so installing it does not take June's own scrolling away.

adb install -r LightControl-v1.0.x.apk

adb shell settings put secure enabled_accessibility_services \
  com.gios.lightcontrol/com.gios.lightcontrol.keys.ControlService
adb shell settings put secure accessibility_enabled 1

adb shell appops set com.gios.lightcontrol WRITE_SETTINGS allow
adb shell appops set com.gios.lightcontrol SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW allow

Alarms

Alarms are this app's own, not AlarmClock.ACTION_SET_ALARM — nothing on LightOS is guaranteed to answer that intent. The stack is AlarmManager.setAlarmClock + USE_EXACT_ALARM (install-granted; unlike SCHEDULE_EXACT_ALARM it needs no Settings screen) → RingService foreground service → RingActivity with showWhenLocked / turnScreenOn, reachable both by full-screen intent and by a direct start (the latter needs the same SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW appop as push-to-talk above). The alarm object travels inside the receiver's intent, not just its id — the receiver deletes a one-shot the instant it fires, so an id alone would resolve to nothing by the time the service reads its extras. The SETUP tab self-reports engine/recogniser/SET_ALARM-handler presence, since LightOS has no Settings screens to check any of that from outside the app.

Texting

Goes through your own BlueBubbles server, POST /api/v1/chat/new with a single address — AppleScript's send-to-buddy lands in the existing thread, so there's no chat guid to resolve and no Private API needed. Shows up in BrightChat like any other message. Contacts merge ContactsContract with the Mac address book pulled from GET /api/v1/contact.

Building

./gradlew :app:assembleRelease

CI builds every push and verifies the signing certificate against signing-fingerprint.txt and that the package declares a launcher icon; pushes to main also cut a GitHub Release — every other branch builds and verifies and stops, which is the way to prove a change without cutting an Obtainium update. The keystore is committed on purpose (keystore/lightvoice.jks) — this is a sideloaded personal app, and a stable certificate is what lets Obtainium update it in place.

Regenerate the launcher icon with python3 scripts/generate_icon.py.

Setup QR page is GitHub Pages from /docs at https://gi-os.github.io/LightVoice/.

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome.

• enabled_accessibility_services is a single shared list — any change to the PTT setup flow needs to keep the colon-join behavior working for anyone who also runs BrightControl.
• Keep the spoken confirmation composed from what the dispatcher actually did, not from what the model claims — that's the guarantee the app makes and it should stay true for new intents too.
• CI publishes a release on every push to main — verify locally before pushing there.

Version history

Version	Change
v1.0.7	Say what the wheel needs, and warn about the accessibility list (docs)
v1.0.6	Scroll the lists and the setup page with the hardware wheel
v1.0.5	Name the assistant June
v1.0.4	Fix the ring race, a leaked meter collector, and an API-31 call on minSdk 29
—	Prefs: drop the unused Context extension properties
—	LightVoice: a voice assistant for the Light Phone III (initial commit)

Licence

MIT.