glados-voice-mcp

A warm, shared GLaDOS text-to-speech server for agents, exposed as an MCP tool. It builds on nimaid/GLaDOS-TTS, included unmodified as a git submodule.

Using an AI agent? Point it at this repository and ask it to follow AGENTS.md; it contains every step to install, register and verify the server.

• Fast: about 100 ms to first audio once the models are loaded; text is split into sentences and the first one plays while the rest is still being synthesized.

• Lazy and shared: the MCP process is a thin proxy. The first speak starts one shared daemon (127.0.0.1:18765) that loads the models, serves every agent on one audio device, and exits after 10 minutes without requests or speech.

• In character: the persona is part of the tool description and speak rejects calls with in_character=false. The server cannot verify the style of the text itself.

• One voice at a time: if a message is loading or playing, speak returns BUSY ... Retry in about N seconds so agents never talk over each other. speak with empty text cuts speech for everyone.

Install

No clone or project directory is needed: uv installs the glados-voice-mcp package from PyPI. Pick exactly one onnxruntime extra: cpu or cuda (NVIDIA, CUDA 13 wheels).

# 1. Build the environment and download the models once (about 125 MB, stored in your user data dir)
uvx --from "glados-voice-mcp[cpu]@latest" glados-voice download-models

# 2. Try it (plays audio)
uvx --from "glados-voice-mcp[cpu]@latest" glados-voice say "Hello, test subject."

Prefer a persistent command? uv tool install "glados-voice-mcp[cpu]" or pipx install "glados-voice-mcp[cpu]" puts glados-voice-mcp on your PATH. To develop, clone with git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/bkmeneguello/glados-voice-mcp and run uv pip install ".[cpu]" in a venv.

Related MCP server: mcp-ai-voice

Register the MCP server

claude mcp add glados-voice -- uvx --from "glados-voice-mcp[cpu]@latest" glados-voice-mcp

For other clients use the command uvx with the arguments --from "glados-voice-mcp[cpu]@latest" glados-voice-mcp; AGENTS.md has Codex, Gemini and JSON examples.

Tool: speak(text, in_character, wait=false). Empty text stops the current speech.

Configuration (environment variables)

The daemon log is glados_voice_daemon.log in the system temp directory. The daemon accepts requests from any local process and has no authentication, but it rejects browser requests (Origin header, non-JSON Content-Type, foreign Host).

Python use

from glados_voice import VoiceEngine

engine = VoiceEngine().start()   # loads in the background
engine.speak("Hello. This is a test.")
engine.wait_idle()

Credits and license

The code is MIT, see LICENSE and NOTICE.md for third-party notices.

• Voice models: they come from dnhkng/GlaDOS and are downloaded at first use. They are not stored or distributed in this repository and are not covered by its MIT license. The voice imitates a character and recordings owned by Valve Corporation, so it is for personal, non-commercial fan use only.

• Unofficial: GLaDOS and Portal belong to Valve Corporation; this project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Valve.

• cuda extra: it installs proprietary NVIDIA libraries from PyPI under NVIDIA's license terms. The cpu extra does not.