Claude Code can already listen to you. Run /voice and you get push-to-talk dictation — you speak, it transcribes into the prompt (docs). What it does not do is talk back. When I leave a long task running, I either babysit the terminal or miss the moment it finishes or asks a question.
So I added the other half: text-to-speech. A hook reads the agent's replies aloud. I can be in another room and still hear "done, tests pass" or "I need a decision here". This post has two parts — a small recipe anyone can paste into their config, and how I wired the same idea into my own tooling for the times I'm not at my desk.
This is a personal hack, not a Claude Code feature. It reads short text aloud after the agent stops. That's it. No wake words, no conversation, no reading code blocks (you don't want that).
The recipe: a hook + your OS speech command
Claude Code hooks run a shell command on lifecycle events. The two that matter here:
