React to the player starting to speak

React locally to the player starting to talk or pressing push-to-talk, before the service confirms it over the network connection.

Whether the player is speaking has always been Convai's own call, announced back over the network — so a character did nothing until that round trip landed, and looked like it noticed the player late. The SDK also watches locally now and publishes LocalPlayerActivityChanged the moment it sees local evidence, in both turn-taking modes.

Prerequisites

• A scene with ConvaiManager connected. See Session lifecycle.

Subscribe to the event

LocalPlayerActivityChanged has no typed property on ConvaiEvents, so subscribe through the raw event hub:

using Convai.Domain.DomainEvents.Runtime;
using Convai.Domain.EventSystem;
using Convai.Runtime.Components;
using UnityEngine;

public class MicrophoneMeter : MonoBehaviour
{
    private SubscriptionToken _token;

    private void OnEnable()
    {
        var hub = ConvaiManager.ActiveManager?.Events?.Raw;
        if (hub == null) return;

        _token = hub.Subscribe<LocalPlayerActivityChanged>(HandleLocalActivity);
    }

    private void OnDisable()
    {
        ConvaiManager.ActiveManager?.Events?.Raw?.Unsubscribe(_token);
        _token = default;
    }

    private void HandleLocalActivity(LocalPlayerActivityChanged e)
    {
        Debug.Log($"[MicrophoneMeter] {e.Source}: {(e.IsActive ? "active" : "inactive")} ({e.Level:F1})");
    }
}

What each source means

LocalPlayerActivityChanged.Source tells you which local evidence raised the event:

Source	Raised by	Fires when
Microphone	A level gate on the open microphone	The captured audio rises above the room's own learned noise floor. Stays active until it falls back near that floor, so a pause inside a sentence does not flicker the state.
PushToTalk	The push-to-talk control	The player presses the control — a decision, not a sound, so this fires before the player has said a word.

The microphone source learns the room's own noise floor rather than using a fixed loudness threshold, so it behaves the same on a quiet headset and a loud desk microphone. It stays closed while a character's own voice is audible through the player's speakers, unless acoustic echo cancellation is genuinely active on the input device — in which case the character's voice never reaches the microphone signal to begin with.

LocalPlayerActivityChanged.Level is a ratio above the measured noise floor, useful for a microphone meter. It is 0 for PushToTalk and for the falling edge of Microphone.

LocalPlayerActivityChanged is a hint, not a turn. It is a guess from local evidence and never routes a message, commits a turn, or bills anything. PlayerSpeakingStateChanged remains Convai's own verdict — the only event that produces a transcript or moves a character into its listening state.

What a character does with it

A character that notices local activity moves to the Attending dialogue state and no further — it cannot reach Listening, take a turn, or send anything from this signal alone, so a false positive costs a glance rather than a mistake.

Whether a character acts on it

Whether this local evidence reaches a character's dialogue state is governed by noticeYouLocally on the Conversation Flow profile, which ships on and is not exposed for editing — the profile's Inspector does not draw it, and it has no public setter. Every character therefore acts on local activity, and the LocalPlayerActivityChanged event reaches your own code either way. See Conversation flow reference for the rest of the profile's fixed behavior.

Verify the reaction

Enter Play mode, connect, and either speak into the microphone or press the push-to-talk control. Confirm your subscriber fires immediately, ahead of Convai's transcript for that utterance.

Next steps

Conversation flowGate your UI on availability