softcane/aloud

Aloud is a Mac tool that reads out loud what AI coding assistants, specifically Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, are saying while they work. Instead of staring at a terminal window waiting for a coding agent to finish or ask a question, a user can let it work in the background and hear when it asks something, needs approval, gets stuck, or finishes a reply. Each coding session is tracked separately, so a person can choose exactly which conversations are allowed to speak. All of the speech is generated locally on the user's own Mac using a text to speech engine called Kokoro, and no reply text is sent to any outside speech service. Once turned on for a session by typing a simple command, Aloud speaks alerts and a short summary of each finished reply. It stays quiet for routine background tool activity, prioritizes questions and approval requests over plain completion messages, and stops old audio when a new message needs to be spoken. A person can ask for the full response to be read aloud, repeat the last thing said, stop playback, or preview the available voices, and there are also keyboard shortcuts for the most common actions. Under the hood, Aloud hooks into events from Claude Code and Codex, turns each one into a simplified internal message, strips out formatting, links, code, and things that look like passwords or API keys, and sends a short instruction to a background program that keeps the speech engine ready to go so it does not have to restart for every message. That background program converts the cleaned text into an audio file and plays it using the Mac's built in audio player. Installing Aloud requires macOS, Python 3.11 or 3.12, and Homebrew, plus an existing Claude Code or Codex setup. On first use, the speech engine may need to download its voice model files, which are then cached for later use. The project is released under the MIT license, so it can be used freely, including for commercial purposes.