This private OpenClaw provider connects Gateway-relay Talk sessions to the existing Athena speech stack. An experimental browser WebRTC path is available through the separate services/athena-realtime-voice service:

local VAD collects a spoken utterance,
Athena Whisper transcribes it,
OpenClaw's normal agent-consult path answers with its configured model and tools,
Athena Qwen3-TTS returns PCM audio to the Talk client.

The older gateway-relay path splits completed replies into short TTS clips. The WebRTC path streams Athena's PCM audio to the browser as it is synthesized. Both paths wait for OpenClaw's agent-consult result before TTS starts; neither speaks partial text while the agent is still writing.

The provider intentionally uses half-duplex audio: microphone input is paused while a response is being transcribed, generated, synthesized, or played. This prevents speaker feedback from aborting TTS. Spoken interruption (barge-in) is therefore disabled; wait until playback finishes before speaking again.

No public speech provider is used. modelProvider names an existing OpenClaw model provider whose Athena base URL and API key are reused at runtime; no second key copy is required. If it is omitted, the plugin checks athena, llama-cpp, and openai in that order.

Recommended talk.realtime configuration:

{
  "provider": "athena-talk",
  "model": "athena-local",
  "speakerVoice": "alloy",
  "mode": "realtime",
  "transport": "webrtc",
  "brain": "agent-consult",
  "providers": {
    "athena-talk": {
      "modelProvider": "llama-cpp",
      "realtimeUpstreamUrl": "http://192.168.1.212:8090/v1/realtime/calls",
      "language": "de",
      "vadThreshold": 0.018,
      "silenceDurationMs": 750,
      "prefixPaddingMs": 300,
      "maxSpeechSeconds": 45
    }
  }
}

The plugin requires OpenClaw 2026.9.4 or newer. Build and validate it before installation:

npm install
npm run build
npm run check
openclaw plugins install . --force --accept-capabilities
openclaw plugins inspect athena-talk --runtime --json

Restart the gateway once if the installation does not trigger an automatic reload. The managed plugin copy is stored in OpenClaw's persistent data directory, so normal image updates do not remove it. Hermes remains unchanged; the provider reuses the same OpenAI-compatible Athena speech endpoints.

Browser and Mac app status (OpenClaw 2026.9.4)

The original 1.0.0 provider implements gateway-relay only. A direct Gateway call to talk.session.create with mode=realtime, transport=gateway-relay, and brain=agent-consult creates an Athena Talk session successfully. The Control UI and Mac app first call talk.client.create, which rejects that transport with talk.client.create is client-owned; use talk.session.create for gateway-relay. Their fallback to talk.session.create is not observed in the affected installation, so the UI still reports a misleading authentication error. A successfully created test session is tied to its Gateway connection and disappears when that connection closes.

The 2026.9.4 browser provider-websocket client accepts only the built-in google-live-bidi protocol and validates the Google WebSocket hostname. Version 1.1.0 adds a separate webrtc browser session using the UI's OpenAI-style WebRTC protocol and the Athena realtime voice bridge. The plugin proxies the SDP offer through the existing OpenClaw HTTPS origin. On 2026-09-16, the installed plugin created a browser session successfully; a synthetic spoken request traversed the real OpenClaw offer route, private WireGuard media connection, Athena Whisper, and Qwen3-TTS and returned audio. The installed browser code also recognizes the bridge's openclaw_agent_consult call. A real Chrome microphone-to-agent-to-speaker call and a second question in the same session were observed on 2026-09-16. The first browser failures required the bridge to announce user and assistant transcript items with stable IDs and predecessor ordering. The Mac setting “Echtzeitweiterleitung über Gateway verwenden” should be off for the browser-owned WebRTC path. On the tested Mac, its UI switch returned to on after navigation even though the native preference was set to false; Mac UI behavior still needs verification. No OpenClaw core files were patched; the plugin lives in OpenClaw's persistent extensions directory and the provider is selected through talk.realtime configuration. gateway-relay remains available as a reversible fallback. Never select provider-websocket for this service. See services/athena-realtime-voice/README.md for setup and limits.