Voice & calls

Twinly's Voice tab offers four ways to give the twin a voice, in a simple grid. The first two are free and fully on your Mac; the last two are optional paid cloud voices for top-tier quality.

Path: System Settings ▸ Accessibility ▸ Personal Voice ▸ Create a Personal Voice.

1. Record the guided phrases in a quiet room. It is about 150 short sentences, roughly 15 minutes at a normal pace.
2. Let your Mac process it. Training runs on-device in the background and can take a while (laptops prefer to be plugged in). You get a notification when the voice is ready.
3. Back in the same pane, turn on Allow apps to request to use Personal Voice, and approve Twinly when it asks.

Then open Twinly's Voice tab and select the Personal Voice card. Nothing about this voice ever leaves your Mac; Apple trains and synthesizes it locally.

Twinly can build its own clone of your voice, entirely on your Mac, from a short set of recordings. In the Voice tab you read a curated set of prompts once; every clip is saved with its text, which makes them a proper training set rather than loose samples. Twinly then builds a voice clone from them.

Recording the prompts once benefits every voice path: the Twinly clone uses them, and the paid providers below stitch them into their reference audio. Record once, choose any voice.

For the best-sounding voice, bring a key from Cartesia or ElevenLabs, two paid cloud voice services with instant cloning. In the Voice tab, paste your key into the provider's card, click clone once, and it builds the voice from your recorded prompts.

• Renders are cached on your Mac, so repeating a line costs nothing.
• If something goes wrong (out of credits, bad key, rate limited), Twinly shows one calm sentence, never a wall of error text.
• Keys live in the macOS Keychain, written by the app.

To make a phone call, the twin's spoken voice has to reach the call as if it were your microphone. macOS does not let one app feed another's mic directly, so Twinly uses a small, free, open-source audio driver called BlackHole. Twinly plays your cloned voice into BlackHole, and the calling app uses BlackHole as its microphone. The far party hears your voice; nothing leaves your Mac, no cloud, no speaker-to-mic loop.

Install it

1. Download the free BlackHole 2ch installer from existential.audio/blackhole and run it like any Mac app.
2. Confirm it installed: open Audio MIDI Setup (Applications ▸ Utilities) and look for a device named BlackHole 2ch. If it is not there, restart your Mac once, the driver loads at startup.

Wire the call path

1. Set the calling app's microphone to BlackHole. For Google Voice in Chrome: open voice.google.com, click the site-settings icon in the address bar, and set Microphone to BlackHole 2ch.
2. Keep your system output on your normal speakers (System Settings ▸ Sound ▸ Output). That is what Twinly listens to for the other side of the call, and how you can hear your own twin.

Once your voice is set and BlackHole is wired, just ask: "call the restaurant and book a table for two at 8". The twin finds the number, places the call through your phone line, and holds the conversation grounded in your goal, with a standing rule to never invent details and to offer to call back when it does not know something.

You watch it live in the Phone tab and on the island: the transcript scrolls, and you can mute or end the call at any moment. The twin works through your own number, so the business sees your real line calling, not a robot.

Today the twin places outbound calls in your voice. Answering incoming calls, recognizing you when you phone your own Mac, and screening unknown numbers, is in active development and not available in this release yet.

Apple's Personal Voice model is large, and the very first time it speaks after a fresh app launch it can take a moment to load. Twinly hides this by pre-warming the voice at launch and the instant a call becomes likely, so in practice calls start speaking immediately. If you want a flawless first call, just open Twinly a minute beforehand.