Abstract: There is disclosed a compact battery-powered, self-contained talk-through unit for passing voice communications through a partition. Typically, the unit is installed in a window partition separating an attendant from the public. Facing the outside of the unit area a microphone and a speaker. Facing the inside, a speaker is mounted within the unit and a microphone is contained at the end of a gooseneck connector. In the quiescent condition, speech from the outside is level-compressed and heard on the inside; speech on the inside, e.g., between two attendants, is not amplified and heard on the outside. It is only when an attendant talks within approximately 2 inches of the gooseneck microphone that the outside-to-inside amplification is turned off and the inside-to-outside amplification is turned on. In this way, the attendant has complete, hands-free control of voice communications; there is no competition between talkers and there is no acoustic feedback.