docs/SPEECH_LOCK.md

Speech lock repair — 2026-09-18

English. Numbers. No fluency / GPT claim until a prompt emits a distinct phrase.

Grok Bot cascade STOP at 48cdb19. Do not stack another α-map / payload / +10k.

What was broken

fact	number
payload + MERGE-train	logits 0.838 → 0.999
α-local copy +10k	logits 0.9987, chat auiseateu : aernun e
MERGE-off ingest	atoms 4–6, surface still identical
last healthy surface	field_next @ 3,458,000 logits 0.838 / spans @ 3,425,000 logits 0.866

Two mechanical locks, not "needs more CE":

1. payload_produce broadcast the winner unigram hist onto every span slot → letter soup.
2. generate_packets committed that soup back into the atomizer → the next tick copies soup.

Turning the frozen α map down on the 3.508M ckpt would have fed the collapsed payload path. Falsified.

One repair (this commit)

• Position-aligned copy only (no broadcast hist).
• Chat payload_copy=False (hard path = frozen α + capped α-MLP only).
• Dialogue wrap Utilisateur: …\nAssistant: (train distribution).
• speech_ok gate: do not re-ingest soup. Hint lexicon, not a Transformer.

Banned: attention, HF tokenizer, byte_decoder reopen, +10k on alpha_local, MERGE retune in the same change.

Run on the box (no Bot)

# STOP the Bot first.
git pull

# Prefer 3.458M field_next, then 3.425M spans. NEVER alpha_local 3.508M.
python3 scripts/speech_chat.py --prompt "Bonjour"
python3 scripts/speech_chat.py --prompt "Qui es-tu ?"
python3 scripts/speech_chat.py --prompt "Il était une fois"

If the response is empty, speech_ok refused soup. That is correct. Load the 3.458M file, not 3.508M.

Next train (only if chat on 3.458M is still scraps)

Single lever: resume 3,458,000, payload_enabled=False, chat merge-off already default, do not lower MERGE thr. Budget ≤25k. Stop if logits > 0.95. Gate = distinct phrases across the three prompts, not logits cos.