Stage 1 Path A: The Mac Ear — Always-On Desktop Microphone Daemon

> Grounded in: Stage 0 finding that the Mac has no microphone listener. You must pick up the phone to talk to the mesh. The single highest-impact addition is a daemon on Mac1 that listens to the built-in microphone, detects a wake phrase, transcribes the command, and injects it into the mesh. This eliminates the phone dependency for voice interaction. The Mac is always on, always in front of you, always connected to the mesh. **Wake word detection**: Two options: 1. **Whisper-based** (accurate but heavier): Run Whisper on every VAD-triggered segment, check transcript for wake phrase 2. **Porcupine/OpenWakeWord** (lightweight): Dedicated wake word model runs continuously, Whisper runs only after wake detection **STT options on Mac1:** - `whisper.cpp` via CLI (~1s for 5s audio on M2) - `mlx-whisper` (Apple Silicon optimized) - Apple SFSpeechRecognizer via `speech_recognition` Python bridge - Mac4/Mac5 remote Whisper (over exo cluster API) - Voice interaction from the desk without phone - Always-on (LaunchAgent, survives logout) - Routes into the existing voice_task_daemon → TTY injection pipeline - Can trigger any fleet command: status, spawn, kill, converge - Uses existing Whisper infrastructure on Mac4/Mac5