Talking to my AI assistant via Discord voice messages

I run an AI assistant (OpenClaw) that lives in my Discord server. It manages my notes, tasks, calendar — basically a second brain I can message. The problem is I don't always want to type. Sometimes I'm walking the dog or cooking and I just want to say "remind me to check the deployment tomorrow" and have it handled.

Discord has voice messages built in. Long press the mic, talk, send. So the question was: can I pipe that audio through to my assistant and have it actually understand what I said?

The setup

Turns out OpenClaw already supports audio transcription via Deepgram. The entire setup was two config changes — add an API key and enable the audio provider:

{
  "env": {
    "vars": {
      "DEEPGRAM_API_KEY": "your_key_here"
    }
  },
  "tools": {
    "media": {
      "audio": {
        "enabled": true,
        "models": [{ "provider": "deepgram", "model": "nova-2" }],
        "providerOptions": {
          "deepgram": { "punctuate": true, "smart_format": true }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart the gateway, done. No webhook plumbing, no separate transcription service, no glue code. When a voice message lands in Discord, OpenClaw picks up the audio attachment, sends it to Deepgram, gets the transcript back and treats it like any other text message.

I was expecting at least an afternoon of debugging. It took about ten minutes.

What I actually use it for

The real value isn't the transcription — it's what happens after. My assistant already knows how to create tasks, update notes, and add calendar events. Voice messages just became another input method.

A few things I find myself doing:

• Brain dumps — rambling about a project while walking, then asking the assistant to extract the action items
• Quick tasks — "add a task to check the CI pipeline after lunch" without opening anything
• Meeting notes — voice-summarising what just happened in a call while it's still fresh

It sounds gimmicky until you've used it for a week and realise you're capturing twice as much because the friction is almost zero.

Cost

Deepgram gives you $200 in free credit on signup. Nova-2 runs at $0.0043/minute — a 30-second voice message is a fraction of a cent. I've been using it daily and haven't dented the free tier.

The takeaway

The setup was trivial. The shift was in how I use the assistant — talking while doing other things instead of stopping to type. Friction went down, capture went up.