Earshot

# Earshot

**Talk to your dog. Out loud.**

Earshot gives you a dog you speak to. Not a menu, not a command — you press a key, say *"find diamonds"*, and he goes and finds them. Speech recognition runs entirely on your own machine, offline, with no account and no server involved.

He is also an animal rather than a tool. He gets hungry, thirsty and fed up. He remembers places you name. He gets better at whatever you actually ask him to do. And if he dies he leaves a bone, and you can sit with it a while and get him back.

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## Talking to him

Press **C** and say something. That is the whole interface.

- **"sit"** · **"stand up"** · **"come here"** · **"stay"**
- **"attack"** — he goes for whatever is threatening you, red-eyed
- **"fetch"** — he collects what is on the ground
- **"go and get a drink"** — he finds water himself and sorts it out
- **"guard"** — he holds that spot and returns to it after every fight
- **"everyone, come here"** — the whole pack at once

**You do not have to say his name.** If only one dog is listening, he knows you meant him — names are for telling two dogs apart. A name heard slightly wrong still works, because a microphone that mishears "Kaiser" should not mean a dog that ignores you.

Every order has many phrasings, because nobody talks to an animal from a command reference. *"Sit"*, *"sit down"*, *"lie down"* and *"park it"* are all the same instruction.

**Prefer typing?** Every order works in chat, word for word. Same parser, no microphone.

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## The nose

**"find diamonds."** He smells it through stone — casts about, catches a scent within twenty blocks in any direction, and walks you there leaving a trail behind him. Then he stands over it and tells you what it is.

It is deliberately not a wallhack. He finds one thing, the nearest, and you have to follow him.

Ask for anything: **"find water"**, **"find a spawner"**, **"find obsidian"**. Out loud he knows every ore and a couple of dozen things worth hunting; typed in chat he knows **every block in the game**, mods included.

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## Places he remembers

**"remember this as home."** Then, six hundred blocks into a cave: **"take me home."**

He sets off, and waits whenever you fall behind. Places are kept on the *dog*, not on you — you are telling an animal something and finding out later whether he took it in. Two dogs can know different places.

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## Looking after him

He tells you in chat when he is hungry, thirsty or unhappy. Feed him meat, hand him a water bucket, or put a hand on him. Stand near him and press **E** to see how he is doing — and what he has got good at.

Every order he carries out is counted, and it buys him something real: **a longer nose, a harder bite, a steadier fetch**. Nothing is unlocked and nothing is chosen. He simply gets good at whatever you actually ask him to do, so your dog ends up shaped like the way you play.

If he dies he leaves a glowing bone. Crouch beside it for ten seconds and he comes back — name, coat, memories and all.

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## Gear

- **A sword** — he bites for whatever that blade says it does, enchantments included, and you see the arc as he swings
- **A bow** — he plants and shoots from range, using arrows from his satchel. Post him with **"guard"** and you have a turret with a heartbeat
- **A chest** — nine slots he carries for you, spilled where he falls
- **Wolf armour** — ten more hearts

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## A pack, not several dogs

Anything that hurts one of them, or gets hurt by one of them, or lays a hand on you, becomes everybody's problem. Dogs already busy are left alone, and a dog told to sit stays sitting — an order outranks an argument.

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## Tricks

**"speak"** · **"beg"** · **"play dead"** · **"roll over"**

They do nothing useful whatsoever, which is the point.

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## The dog you are given

You start with one, and **his coat comes from the biome you woke up in** — rusty out of a jungle, black out of an old pine forest, snowy off a mountain grove. It is decided once and never again, which is what makes him yours rather than a setting.

Name him with **Shift+C**. No anvil, no name tag.

*(There are a few names that change him. They are not written down anywhere, because a secret you are told is only a feature.)*

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## Other languages

The orders that ship with the mod are English, but nothing about the machinery is. Drop a `words.json` into `config/earshot` with your own phrasings, and a Vosk model for your language into `config/earshot/model`, and he understands you in that instead.

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## Notes

- **Speech is offline.** No audio leaves your machine, and no network service does the recognition. The first time you press **C**, a ~40 MB speech model downloads once (about 70 MB unpacked, into `config/earshot/model`).
- **The microphone only opens near a dog**, and only while you have it switched on.
- **Singleplayer and servers** both. Other players' dogs ignore you.
- **Everything is configurable** that ought to be — listening range, how far a shout carries, satchel reach, and whether players are given a dog at all.