The voice bank: every duck sounds different

Each Microduck’s voice bank is generated from its board’s serial number, so two ducks sound different. This is not decoration — it is a usable identifier.

What it is for

robotctl quack

With several robots in a room, making one quack tells you which one you are SSH’d into.

The command can be trusted for that because of one detail: a robot with no voice says so — audio off, or no bank — rather than staying silent. So silence always means the wrong duck, with no ambiguity.

When it is generated

sounds ensure-bank runs on every release install. To regenerate by hand:

/opt/robot/daemon/current/bin/sounds show
sudo /opt/robot/daemon/current/bin/sounds ensure-bank --force

It is also what “your own” means

A robot’s motion comes from the policies you trained; its voice comes from its own serial. Put together, two robots of the same model are not the same robot.