heard

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, with no keys to manage. Every new account starts with a 14-day Power trial, no card required. 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 Heard.dmg, drag Heard.app into /Applications, and open it. Setup walks you through sign-in, permissions and your voice.

Works in every terminal

Heard listens to your agent, not your terminal, so narration works wherever the agent runs: Ghostty, Herdr, cmux, iTerm2, Terminal, Warp, WezTerm, tmux, VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed. Heard also knows where each session lives, so a jump back lands on the exact Ghostty terminal or tmux pane, or the right iTerm2 or Terminal window.

Cloud agents: Grok Bot, Muse and friends

Agents that live in the cloud can't reach your Mac, so they report to Heard instead. Add one remote MCP server to the agent, https://api.heard.dev/v1/mcp/agent, and its progress, questions and results are spoken on your Mac like any local session, named after the agent: "Scout finished: …", "Muse needs you: …".

Set these up in Settings → Connections → Cloud agents: each agent has numbered steps and the exact text to paste, each with a Copy button. More agents connect the same way through the CLI bundled with the app: Cursor, Instinct, OpenAI Dots, Claude Code or Codex running on another machine, or any other MCP-capable agent:

/Applications/Heard.app/Contents/MacOS/heard-board connect <agent>

Talk back (Power): hold right ⌘ and start with the agent's name, "Muse, summarize my inbox". Heard queues the message in that agent's Heard inbox, the agent picks it up with the heard_inbox tool between steps, and Heard tells you when it did. Or ask Parrot: "Hey Parrot, tell Scout to rerun the tests."

Cloud agents need a signed-in Heard account. Their reports pass through Heard's servers on the way to your Mac.

Parrot (Power)

Say "Hey Parrot" and talk to it. Parrot knows your projects and every connected agent, local or cloud:

• "Catch me up." A fresh spoken recap of what landed, what's still running and what needs you, across all your agents.
• Ask anything about your projects, your agents, or what changed while you were away.
• Hand off work. Message an agent by name, or open a project in the right terminal or editor.
• Remembers you. Keeps what you tell it about yourself and your work; see or remove it in Settings → Parrot.
• Looks at your screen when you ask it to (needs Screen Recording permission).

Voice in (Power)

• Push to talk: hold right ⌘ to talk to an agent, or to dictate into whatever you're typing in, in any app.
• Hands-free dictation: double-press right ⌘ and talk without holding it; tap once to send.
• On-device speech-to-text: transcription runs on your Mac.
• Call-aware: Heard stays quiet while you're on a Zoom, Meet, Teams, Slack, Discord or FaceTime call.

So on Power, Heard is the full voice loop: you speak, your agents do the work, Heard tells you how it went.

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 when a trial ends without a plan it goes quiet. See pricing →

Invite a friend and you both win: they get a 30-day Power trial, and you get a free month of Pro once they've used Heard for real.

What it does

• Narrates with judgment, not transcription. Heard decides what to say from context: what just ran, whether it's a decision moment or routine progress, what you've already heard. Not every tool call gets the same airtime.
• Three listening modes. Co-pilot for screen-on work, short signposts. Companion for eyes-off (driving, cooking, walking), fuller briefings. Focus for alert-only, quiet unless something needs you.
• Every agent, one voice layer. Claude Code and Codex through hooks, cloud agents through one MCP URL, all in the same spoken queue.
• Out of your way. Holding right ⌘ shows a small Listening pill; a soft light at the screen edge is Parrot's, shown while it listens, thinks or answers; the corners hold mute (bottom left) and Settings (bottom right).
• Your iPhone as a remote (Power). Pair by QR code, listen live, and reply by voice or tap.
• Four personas, fork-your-own. Aria (calm, direct), Friday (bright, breezy), Jarvis (Marvel butler), Atlas (cinematic narrator).

Personas

In the app, Friday and Atlas need Pro or Power. In the open-source engine, fork your own: drop a Markdown file with frontmatter into ~/Library/Application Support/heard/personas/.

Listening modes

In the app: Settings → Jarvis → How you work.