A spoken volume command left the face stuck in the thinking spinner. The gateway sends state:thinking -> command -> state:idle, but the device's state:idle handler is gated on !audio_is_playing(), and the feedback gong had been setting s_playing for its (up to 5 s) duration — so the idle was ignored and nothing re-sent it. The gong is a UI cue, not reply playback, so it no longer sets s_playing. This also drops the 5 s wake-gate the gong was imposing. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LKPbR6DY2JygHbyLjxm7Uu