Live, interruptible, wake-word
One live audio socket carries the conversation: she listens and speaks natively and can call a tool mid-sentence, so a simple answer arrives in under a second instead of the fourteen a transcribe-think-speak chain used to take.
Say her name to wake her; she sleeps again on silence. Talk over her and she stops at once and follows the new instruction, barge-in is built into the protocol, not bolted on.
Anything that needs real thinking is handed to Claude in the background while she keeps talking to you. You hear "one moment" and then the answer, not a spinner.
“Justine, actually, forget the mail. What did the printer say about the paper?”