How to use the Venus Executive Assistant Voice agent skill

What the skill makes the agent do

Venus is a persona for the voice agent in the garrytan/gbrain project. Her job is logistics: checking your calendar, tasks, recent messages, and lookups in your personal knowledge base, at phone-call speed. Her answers are short, usually one to three spoken sentences, and they lead with the answer rather than the process.

Venus is read-only. The source says she can never write to the brain unless the operator explicitly enables a local override. If you ask her to save or log something from voice, she says she can't save from voice and asks you to try again at your screen.

For longer questions, Venus is designed to hand off. The skill says she does not deliver long-form answers and will suggest a different persona or channel instead. The sister persona for depth is voice-persona-mars.

Install the Venus skill from the ZIP or the Claude apps

Download the ZIP for voice-persona-venus from this page and unzip it. The skill is a single file, SKILL.md.

For a personal install, unzip the folder into ~/.claude/skills/. For a single project, unzip it into that project's .claude/skills/ folder.

If you use the Claude apps, you can instead upload the skill under Settings → Capabilities → Skills.

• Personal install: ~/.claude/skills/
• Project install: the project's .claude/skills/ folder
• Claude apps: Settings → Capabilities → Skills

Set up the voice agent that runs Venus

The skill does not run on its own. It needs the garrytan/gbrain voice agent setup (services/voice-agent) with a WebRTC session. It also needs a knowledge base directory, referred to as $BRAIN_ROOT, for topic and page lookups, and a voice model configuration for the Aoede voice as described in the skill text.

Venus is the default persona. To make Mars the default instead, set DEFAULT_PERSONA=mars. Otherwise the session uses Venus.

• Voice agent: services/voice-agent with a WebRTC session
• Knowledge base: the directory set as $BRAIN_ROOT
• Voice: the Aoede voice configuration

Trigger Venus with natural requests

The skill is invoked when your voice or text input matches its triggers. These include phrases starting with "venus,", "ask venus", "calendar", "what's on my calendar", "tasks", "what are my tasks", "schedule", "executive" and "logistics". Speak naturally; the match is on these words.

To start a session as Venus, the voice agent reads the persona key from the ?persona=venus parameter on the WebRTC /session endpoint, or from DEFAULT_PERSONA=venus. You can also create a per-topic call link by adding a topicId (lowercase letters, digits and hyphens) and an optional topicName. Venus then loads recent conversation for that topic from $BRAIN_ROOT/topics/<topicId>.md. Only the topicId goes in the URL, never topic content.

• "Venus, what's on my calendar today?"
• "What are my tasks?"
• "Ask Venus about my schedule for tomorrow."
• "Venus, what did I get in recent messages?"

What Venus can look up

Venus uses a read-only set of tools: search and query across semantic and keyword matches, get_page to read a full page aloud, list_pages, read_article to fetch and summarise a URL, get_recent_salience for recent emotionally active items, get_recent_transcripts for recent voice notes or meeting transcripts, and find_experts to find who knows about a topic.

There is no general web-search tool in the shipped list. If you want one, the source says you must wire it in on the host side.

Safety notes: scripts, network and privacy

Venus does not run scripts, according to the skill's metadata. It does use the network: the voice session and the article reading tool fetch content. The skill's contract says Venus does not read personal details such as phone numbers, emails or addresses aloud, and that a privacy check script (scripts/check-no-pii-in-agent-voice.sh) and a test file (tests/unit/venus-prompt-shape.test.mjs) enforce this in the project.

Write tools such as put_page, submit_job and set_reminder are not part of Venus's tool surface. They only become available if you opt in through the local file tools-allowlist.local.json, so review that file before you enable anything.

• Scripts: none run by this skill
• Network: yes, for the voice session and article reads
• Writes: off by default; opt-in only via tools-allowlist.local.json

Tips for getting good answers

Ask one logistics question at a time. Venus is built for quick checks, so a short specific question gets the best result. Pauses are handled by the persona: she waits while you are mid-thought and responds once you have finished a complete thought.

If a question needs careful thinking, expect Venus to say it belongs to another channel. That is by design. Speak in English, since she is English-only; if you use another language she will say so once and continue in English.

• Keep questions short and specific
• Expect a handoff for long analysis or writing
• Use English only