Heard - Give Claude Code and Codex a voice
Heard is a macOS voice layer for your agentic workflows. It connects to Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor and turns their output into intelligent summaries you can hear. Full commentary when your eyes are elsewhere, or silence until something errors or needs a decision. With agents run in parallel, Heard summarizes at the project level, so you hear where the work stands, not five terminals talking over each other. Pair your phone and it comes with you. Open source, free for personal use.
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@itskellysun Congratulations. And happy product launch.
@huisong_li thanks Huisong!
Congratulations on the launch!
Really like the focus on the other half of AI interaction. does Heard support different speaking styles depending on the type of project or agent?
@rivendell_chorro right now you can adjust level of details and when it speaks. is that what you're referring to?
Congratulations on the launch!
The voice first experience sounds interesting. can Heard recognise when multiple agents are working on the same task? how are overlapping updates handled?
@carter_garcia thanks! attribution comes from the folder path and context building over time - Heard reads where each agent is working and maps it to a feature or directory. so "same task" becomes concrete: agents in the same folder are treated as working the same area, and it can roll their updates together instead of narrating each thread on its own.
overlap is handled at the speaking layer. updates queue rather than colliding, so you get them one at a time with the voice telling you which agent each came from - no two things talking at once. and when several are churning in the same feature, you hear a rolled-up "where this area stands" rather than a play-by-play from each.
curious does your same-task setup mean agents in one folder, or spread across different parts of the repo?
congratulations! can i respond entirely by voice while away from my desk? or do some actions still require opening the desktop app?
@dylan_russell yes you can! you can only do that in Heard Power right now: https://heard.dev/power code: friendsofheard
you can be completely hands off, the desktop app is only for viewing and settings
Congratulations! this feels like a productivity upgrade rather than just another AI wrapper. how does Heard handle long running coding sessions? does the quality of summaries improve over time?
@vespertine_dallarosa in long sessions it can give you summaries continuously or only when needed depending on your settings!
Congratulations on the launch! 🚀
Really curious about the technical side. how much system overhead does Heard add while monitoring multiple agents? is performance impacted much?
@daris_esteban thanks! it's light. Heard isn't polling or scanning your machine - it reads the output stream the agent already produces, so the monitoring itself is close to free. the only real cost is the summarization pass, and local TTS if you run voices on-device rather than through the cloud.
running several agents at once doesn't multiply that much, since the heavy part is per-event, not per-agent. haven't seen it get in the way of the actual agents doing work.
Congratulations on shipping!
The idea of each agent having its own voice is clever.can users assign custom voices to different agents?seems like that would make them easier to distinguish.
@jazzlyn_amspoker we actually made this happen in a previous version and decided it was too messy. however, might bring that back as a setting that people can try with!
Congrats! what inspired you to focus on spoken summaries instead of visual dashboards?was there a specific pain point that pushed you in this direction?
@theo_eli i hated reading through 10 terminal windows to catch up on what each one is doing, and I hated how verbose some of these LLMs are, they don't need to be that!
Love the idea of replacing terminal watching with listening. does Heard keep historical voice summaries for later review? or is the experience designed to be entirely live?
@saskia_visser right now it's live, but we're working on a version where you can just put all summaries aside and go through them when you want!
the project-level summarization across parallel agents is the part that stands out to me, most voice/notification tools just narrate everything and become noise. when it decides what counts as "something errors or needs a decision" across say 4 parallel Claude Code sessions, is that heuristic hardcoded or does it learn what you personally care about over time?
@omri_ben_shoham1 that's such a great observation. honest answer: heuristics today, learning loop coming soon.
right now each session gets a quick read - a fresh failure is blocked, an agent mid-decision or dumping a long response needs you, everything else is routine. four sessions, four independent reads, and the blocked/decision ones jump the queue over routine progress. a reasoning pass can override those when context warrants, so it's not a fixed rule table, but it's judging the moment, not your personal taste yet.
that personal-preference layer - it learning what you specifically care about over time - is what's coming next. for now you shape it with the verbosity dial per agent!