Prosody Ink — origin note¶

Written: 2026-06-14 · Owner: Mohsen Seyedkazemi Ardebili Shipped as: ADR-v2-002 — Prosody Auto-Formatting Tier: design/ — public. Historical origin note; the ADRs above are the current source of truth.

The idea¶

The pitch: a transcript is normally a flat token stream that throws away everything the prosodic channel carries for free — stress, pause length, intonation. The dream was dictation that keeps a thin, cheap slice of that music on the page: lean on a word and it lands in bold, let a thought finish and breathe and a paragraph break opens, without ever having to say "comma" or "new paragraph" out loud. The decision gate explicitly split the idea into a safe subset (pause-to-paragraph, stress-to-bold) it judged ready to build, and a riskier one (pitch-to-question-mark) it flagged as needing more evidence first.

What shipped¶

The safe subset shipped: src/yazses/postprocess/prosody.py turns a pause at or above a configured threshold into a paragraph break, and reuses ASR-level word-confidence signals for emphasis marking — wired to the prosody feature toggle (off by default). It is implemented as a pure post-processing pass over word timings and confidences, not a separate prosody model. The pitch-to-question-mark direction the original card flagged as unproven was not built as part of this pass.