heard

Your coding agent has a voice now.

Heard speaks your coding agent's outputs so you can get up, walk around, and still know what's going on.
Think Jarvis for your coding agents — a voice layer for Claude Code, Codex, and any AI workflow: your agent narrates its work out loud, you talk back hands-free.

_{Counterpart to input tools like Wispr Flow. Wispr handles what you say to your agent; Heard handles what it says back.}

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See and hear it run

🔊 Turn sound on for demo

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/d823a946-fb6f-438b-904f-aa66d4268ed1

Get the app

The app is the managed experience: download, sign in, and you're narrating - Heard runs the cloud voices and the narration brain for you, no keys to manage. Prefer to run it yourself with your own keys? See Self-host.

Have your coding tool install it (recommended)

Paste this into Claude Code, Codex, or any AI coding tool:

Install Heard so you can narrate your work to me out loud. Run: curl -L https://heard.dev/download/cc -o /tmp/heard.zip && unzip -o /tmp/heard.zip -d /Applications && xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Heard.app && open /Applications/Heard.app, then hand it back to me - a quick setup window opens and I'll take it from there.

Manual

Download the latest Heard.zip, drag Heard.app into /Applications, double-click to launch. Onboarding walks you through sign-in, permissions, and your voice.

Codex

Heard supports both Codex CLI and Codex App.

• Codex CLI: turn on Codex in Heard, then open Codex CLI, type /hooks, and trust the Heard hooks.
• Codex App: keep Heard running from the menu bar. Heard watches Codex Desktop's local session log and narrates new app activity automatically once Codex is enabled.

You should not need to run a development daemon. If Heard ever starts with a stale daemon socket or pid file, the app now cleans that up on launch.

Plans

Free is the open-source path - clone this repo and run the engine with your own ElevenLabs / Anthropic keys or fully local Kokoro; no account, nothing through our cloud. The downloadable app is the official closed build - a native successor to this engine with the cloud voices and narration brain run for you; sign in and your plan decides what's on. The app is key-free by design, so a lapsed trial just goes quiet. Power adds hands-free voice control - you talk to your agent and it acts. See pricing →

Invite a friend and you both win: they start on a 30-day trial, and you get a free week of Pro for each friend who activates.

Your Jarvis moment

Every AI workflow deserves a voice. Heard is the voice layer: a Jarvis-style narrator (that's literally our default voice's name) that turns your agent's stream of tool calls and replies into spoken updates — and on Power, listens back, so you converse with your agent like Tony Stark talks to Jarvis. Works with Claude Code, Codex CLI, and the Codex app today.

What it does

• Narrates with judgment, not just transcription. Heard decides what to say based on context - your recent activity, what tool just ran, whether something is a decision moment or routine progress. Not every tool call gets the same airtime.
• Three listening modes you switch between. Co-pilot for screen-on work - short hooks and signposts. Companion for eyes-off (driving, cooking, walking) - fuller briefings that name the choice and surface the decision. Focus for alert-only use - quiet unless something needs your attention.
• Multi-agent aware. Run 3+ agents in parallel; Heard voices the most salient one and quietly summarises the others. Each gets a distinct voice so you can tell them apart by ear.
• *Talk back, hands-free (Power).* Not just listening - reply out loud and your agent acts on it. Approve a step, answer a prompt, or redirect it without touching the keyboard.
• Four personas, fork-your-own. Aria (calm, direct), Friday (bright, breezy), Jarvis (Marvel butler), Atlas (cinematic narrator).
• Works with any coding CLI. First-class adapters for Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Codex App; heard run <command> wraps anything else.

Personas

Fork your own - drop a Markdown file with frontmatter into ~/Library/Application Support/heard/personas/.

Listening modes

Switch from the menu bar → Mode.

Running multiple agents

Heard's brain handles cross-agent salience automatically - when 2+ sessions are firing, the one with the most salient signal (blocked, decision moment, failure) gets voiced; the others get summarised. Each session is given a distinct voice so you can tell them apart by ear.

Pin a specific session if you want to focus: menu bar → Active agents → click one. Click again to unpin.

Tuning

The basics - persona, voice, speed, mode, pause/resume - all live in the menu bar. Hotkeys: ⇧⌥. to pause, ⇧⌥, to resume.

Deeper knobs (verbosity profiles, per-repo overrides, narration preferences) live in Settings or .heard.yaml. Most users never need to touch them - Heard's listening modes cover the common cases on their own.

Self-host (open source)

Heard is Apache-2.0. The packaged app above is the managed experience; if you'd rather run it from source - your own keys, no account, full control - clone and configure it:

git clone https://github.com/heardlabs/heard.git
cd heard
python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .

# bring your own keys - used directly by the daemon, nothing through our servers
heard config set elevenlabs_api_key <your-key>   # voice (skip this → local Kokoro)
heard config set speechify_api_key <your-key>    # voice, alternative (Simba 3.2)
heard config set anthropic_api_key <your-key>    # narration brain (skip → neutral templates)

# wire up your coding agent - the daemon auto-starts on the first tool call
heard install claude-code        # also: codex-cli, codex-app

That's the DIY path: you own keys, updates, and config. Everything's configurable (personas in heard/personas/*.md, verbosity in heard/profiles/*.yaml, per-repo .heard.yaml). The managed tiers are the same engine with the voices + brain run for you.

FAQ

Depends on which backends you opt into.

• Voice synth. ElevenLabs and Speechify send spoken text over HTTPS. Kokoro runs fully locally - nothing leaves the machine.
• Narration. Heard sends compact event summaries (what tool ran, the agent's response text, recent context) to Claude Haiku 4.5 to decide what to say and shape it in your persona's voice. Either through your own Anthropic key, through Heard's managed proxy if you're signed in, or - with no key and no sign-in - falls back to neutral templates locally.

The free tier covers light daily use. A heavy day of pair-programming (2-3 hrs of narration) typically lands in the few-cents-to-low-dimes range on the paid Starter plan. Switch to Kokoro (free, local) for a hard ceiling.

No. Hooks fire-and-forget over a Unix socket; the daemon synthesises and plays asynchronously. Your agent never blocks on Heard.

Yes - Apache 2.0. The easiest places to contribute are adapters (heard/adapters/), personas (heard/personas/*.md), and verbosity profiles (heard/profiles/*.yaml).

Compatibility

macOS 13+ · Claude Code + Codex CLI/App first-class · Cursor and Aider planned · anything else via heard run.

Status

Releases on this repo are the official closed app (the download surface); this open-source engine is built from source — see Self-host. Engine status: cross-event-judgment narration via the Heard brain (one Haiku call per meaningful event sees your recent context, the active agents, and the current event, then decides what to say). Co-pilot / Companion / Focus listening modes, multi-agent salience with a distinct per-window voice each, hands-free voice control on Power, and automatic failover across ElevenLabs / Speechify / local Kokoro. First-class Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Codex App adapters. Used daily by the author. Backward-compatible API surface; deeper knobs may move into preferences over time.

License

Apache 2.0.

Heard runs speech recognition locally using NVIDIA's
Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3
(CC-BY-4.0) and Silero VAD (MIT).
Full credits and license texts are in
THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.