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Block 3 — Local summarization

Block 3 turns a Block 1 NewMailEvent into a SummarizedMailEvent: same mail fields plus one speakable_line for TTS (Block 4). Everything stays in memory; no cloud summarization API.

Model

  • csebuetnlp/mT5_multilingual_XLSum (~580M params, 44 languages)
  • Summarizes in the source language (plain text: From, Subject, body)
  • Runs locally via transformers on CPU
  • Download ~2.3 GB; expect ~2 GB+ RAM at inference

Configure in ~/.config/voxpost/voxpost.toml:

[summarize]
model = "csebuetnlp/mT5_multilingual_XLSum"

Override once: VOXPOST_SUMMARIZER_MODEL=… (any compatible seq2seq hub id).

See BLOCK_3_MODELS.md for why this model was chosen.

Install

pip install -e ".[summarize]"
voxpost summarize download

Model files land under ~/.config/voxpost/models/mT5_multilingual_XLSum/.

Test (sample event)

voxpost summarize test
voxpost summarize test --show-input

Test (real event JSON from voxpost listen)

# Terminal 1
voxpost listen

# Copy one JSON line, then:
voxpost summarize test --event-json '{"account_id":"...", ...}'

Or save a line to event.json and:

voxpost summarize test --file event.json

Output is SummarizedMailEvent JSON — all mail fields plus speakable_line.

Listen with summarization

voxpost listen --summarize

Each new inbox message prints summarized JSON instead of raw NewMailEvent.

Privacy

  • Model downloaded once; inference is local only
  • Set HF_HUB_OFFLINE=1 after download for fully offline runs
  • No email content sent to Hugging Face Inference API

Pipeline

NewMailEvent → build_model_input() → mT5 XLSum → polish_for_tts() → speakable_line → SummarizedMailEvent

Block 4 (local TTS) consumes speakable_line only.

Speakable polish (TTS-friendly output)

Voxpost makes output speakable in three steps:

  1. Body cleaning — clean_email_body() strips forward wrappers, signatures, URLs, and legal disclaimers before the model runs.
  2. Post-processing — polish_for_tts() expands day codes (JEU → jeudi, Wed → Wednesday), email shorthand (mtg, tmrw, pls), and symbols (&, %).
  3. Quality gate — is_usable_summary() rejects weak or meta-echo lines; template fallback uses the cleaned body.

Set locale for expansion tables:

export VOXPOST_SPEAKABLE_LANG=all   # default — English + French day codes
export VOXPOST_SPEAKABLE_LANG=fr    # French day codes only
export VOXPOST_SPEAKABLE_LANG=en    # English only

Block 2 (rules) is not implemented yet. VIP senders, keywords, and quiet hours need the desktop settings UI (Block 5) — until then, every inbox event may be summarized and spoken.