Soundboard Plugin Handbook

Soundboard Plugin is a Claude Code plugin that gives your coding assistant a voice. It wraps the voice-soundboard TTS engine and exposes spoken output through slash commands and MCP tools, all running locally on your machine.

What it does

• Emotion-aware speech — detects context and routes to the right voice and tone across 8 emotions (neutral, serious, friendly, professional, calm, joy, urgent, whisper).
• 12 curated voices — male, female, American, British. Each voice has a distinct personality and is pre-approved for use.
• Multi-speaker dialogue — auto-casting, stage directions, and speed modifiers let Claude narrate conversations between characters.
• Code narration — /soundboard:narrate walks through source files with adaptive pacing, splitting at sentence boundaries.
• SSML-lite — fine-grained control with pauses, emphasis, pitch, and rate tags.
• Inline SFX — <ding> and <chime> generate pure-Python WAV tones inline.
• Inner monologue — ambient system with rate limiting and automatic redaction. Claude can think out loud while working.
• Workflow notifications — spoken alerts for build, test, and deploy events.

How it works

The plugin runs as a stdio MCP server. Claude Code sends JSON-RPC messages to the plugin, which passes text through a speech pipeline (chunking, SSML parsing, emotion routing, dialogue parsing, SFX generation, orchestration, WAV concatenation) and hands the result to the voice-soundboard engine for synthesis and playback.

Everything runs locally. No network calls, no telemetry, no cloud APIs unless you explicitly configure a remote voice backend.

Handbook contents

Page	What you will find
Getting Started	Prerequisites, installation, first commands
Commands	All 5 slash commands and the full MCP tool surface
Voices	Voice table, emotion routing, configuration
Architecture	Pipeline diagram, component breakdown, security properties
For Beginners	Gentle introduction, first 5 minutes, common mistakes, glossary