June 13, 2026 · olafkfreund

A morning with GogMail, hands-free: voice, an agentic assistant, and a Zoom call without leaving the terminal

The first version of GogMail could do things — send mail, create events, add tasks. What it couldn’t do was show you anything through the assistant, and talking to it meant typing. This release changes both. Here’s a concrete morning to show how it fits together.

08:55 — “What’s waiting for me?”

I open GogMail in a tmux pane, click the Talk button in the Gemini drawer, and say:

“Show me my latest emails.”

The clip is captured by the mic, sent to Gemini to transcribe, and the transcript flows into the same assistant loop as if I’d typed it. A second later the Gmail view opens, populated — and the assistant adds a one-line summary in the panel instead of dumping the whole list:

Showing your inbox — 6 unread. Two look time-sensitive: a contract from Legal and a reschedule request from Jordan.

That’s the important change: the assistant now has read tools. “Show me my latest emails”, “what’s on my calendar this week”, “what are my open tasks”, “find the doc about the Q3 roadmap” — each fetches real data through the gog CLI, summarizes it, and opens the matching client tab so the data lives where you’d expect it, not buried in a chat log.

09:01 — Planning the day by voice

“What’s on my calendar this week?”

The Calendar tab opens on the week and the assistant calls gog calendar events --week under the hood — relative dates like “this week” just work, because the assistant is told the current time and resolves them itself. Then:

“What are my open tasks?”

The Tasks tab fills in. If spoken replies are enabled in Settings, the assistant answers out loud — and not in the old robotic monotone. It now uses Google’s Gemini TTS (the gemini-3.1-flash-tts-preview voice), played back through your system audio, with espeak kept only as an offline fallback.

09:08 — Triage, the docked way

Jordan wants to reschedule. I hit Reply and the compose window slides in as a right-docked panel — Gmail-web style — so I can still see the thread behind it. Need more room? The Fullscreen toggle expands it to the whole client and back. I let Gemini draft the reply (“propose Thursday 2pm, keep it warm”), tweak a line, and send.

The contract from Legal goes into a folder: the Label button opens a picker of my existing labels with a “Move here (also remove from Inbox)” option — or I type a new label name and it’s created on the spot. Moving it drops me straight back to the inbox list.

09:15 — “Start a meeting”

The standup is now. Instead of hunting for a link, I open the Zoom tab and click Create Meeting. GogMail mints a Server-to-Server OAuth token, creates an instant meeting via the Zoom REST API, copies the join link to my clipboard for the team, and opens the host URL so my desktop Zoom client launches straight into the call. (Prefer Google Meet? One click in the Meet tab does the same and hands back a clean link — no JSON blob.)

All of that happened in one terminal pane, most of it without touching the keyboard.

What made it possible

None of this required a new architecture — it reused the one the project started with:

• The assistant was already agentic. A single TOOLS registry drives both the prompt the model sees and the dispatch, and the loop already fed a tool’s output back to the model. Adding “show me X” was mostly adding read tools whose handlers return capped, formatted data — and a side effect that navigates to the right view.
• Voice is just a front-end. Recording shells out to arecord/ffmpeg/sox (no native audio dependency); transcription and the natural voice both go through the Gemini key you already have. Speech becomes the text that drives the existing tools, so every capability is voice-addressable for free.
• Everything stays honest and tested. Read handlers cap their output so they can’t blow the context window; tool calls are only dispatched from fenced or whole-message JSON so a crafted email subject can’t trick the assistant into a destructive action; and the whole thing is covered by a unittest suite wired into nix flake check, including a NixOS VM test for the module.

GogMail still doesn’t talk to Google directly — gog owns auth, Gemini handles AI and now voice, and the Zoom REST API handles meetings. The terminal just got a lot more conversational.

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