Catch and organize thought before it becomes work.
The layer above the cockpit: a local, wake-word voice loop and a cognitive co-pilot — the Brainstorm Engine — built for brains that generate ideas faster than they can act on them.
In development — not yet released. OAra Voice, its first component, runs live on our own hardware today.
The agent harness. Stands alone on your hardware.
The desktop cockpit. Sits on Prometheus.
The thinking layer. Voice in, spoken answers out, and an idea engine that holds the thread.
A hands-free loop from your mouth to the agent and back: wake word → local speech recognition → a router that decides where the request goes → the agent → local text-to-speech. All of it runs on your own hardware — nothing leaves the house to be heard or spoken. On our reference stack the warm round-trip is about 1.1 seconds from end of speech to start of answer, and a hands-free Android push-to-talk client carries it into the rest of the house.
A thinking layer between voice and execution. It exists for the moment an idea shows up at the wrong time: capture it the instant it exists, organize it, hold it — and decide later, deliberately, when it becomes a task. Designed with ADHD brains in mind, where the bottleneck is never generating ideas but keeping them alive long enough to act. It captures and organizes your thought; it never thinks for you, and nothing it holds becomes work until you say so.
Cognition rides on the two layers below it: Prometheus does the work, Beacon shows it. Voice is an interface into the same daemon — like Telegram, like the desktop app — not a separate system with its own brain. The Brainstorm Engine sits one step higher: it holds thought above the execution layer, and only when you decide an idea is ready does it hand the work down to the harness to execute.
Mic ──► Wake/PTT ──► ASR ──► Router ──┬──► Quick answer ──┐
├──► Brainstorm ────┼──► TTS ──► Speaker
└──► Agent ─────────┘
Every stage local. The router decides; the speaker answers.
“Degraded is a state that gets announced, never absorbed.”
That is the first law of this codebase, and it exists because we watched a subsystem fail silently for months while reporting that everything was fine. So every daemon in the Cognition stack writes a heartbeat, a watcher treats staleness as an alarm, and a component that was supposed to be on but isn't trips the same alarm as one that crashed. Silence is treated as failure — a degraded state is surfaced, spoken, and shown, never quietly worked around.
Cognition is in active development on our own stack. The voice loop — wake word to spoken answer — runs live end-to-end on our hardware today; the Brainstorm Engine is specified and being built. None of it is packaged or released yet, and there is no public repo for this layer — when there is, it will be linked here.
The stack below it is open today: the Prometheus agent harness is public at github.com/OAraLabs/Prometheus.