About
You kick off a refactor, switch to your browser, and forget the terminal exists. Ten minutes later Claude has been sitting on a yes/no the whole time.
Back to You gives Claude Code a quiet voice. It says "Back to you." when a task finishes and "Waiting on you." when it needs a decision—short, flat, never enthusiastic, like a competent engineer sitting beside you. Every clip is original audio made for this project, not game sounds borrowed from somewhere else.
What you hear
- A task finishes - "Back to you."
- Claude needs a decision - "Waiting on you."
- A turn fails - "Hit an error."
The first one plays at the end of every response, which is the point and also the thing to know before installing. Every clip stays under about a second and a half for exactly that reason.
Voice packs
Four ship today, and which one you want is the only question the installer asks.
claude(default) - calm, dry, competent-engineer-beside-you. Understated humour, never enthusiastic.gigatron- a reference to Ultron from the Avengers movie Age of Ultron.mistress-of-pain- a nod to Claudia Black's Cydaea from Diablo III.jay-run- can you guess who?
Switching later rewrites a single line in sound-theme.txt—no reinstall, no
restart, effective on the next sound. Drop your own .mp3 or .wav files into
a pack folder and the hook picks one at random each time it fires, so you can
stack as many takes as you like.
Install
npx backtoyou
Node.js is the only prerequisite. No Homebrew, no jq, no Python, and the
package has no dependencies of its own. npx backtoyou --uninstall backs up
your settings, unwires the hooks, and deliberately keeps any packs or takes you
added yourself.
How it works
Claude Code hooks run a command when
something happens. Back to You installs two hook scripts and points four events
at them: Stop, Notification, PreToolUse (for the multiple-choice picker,
which has no notification type of its own), and StopFailure. It merges those
entries into ~/.claude/settings.json without touching anything else, backing
the file up first.
The hooks are Node on macOS and Linux, PowerShell on Windows, which looks
odd until you see why. Everything Node buys here solves a Unix problem—reading
one field out of the hook payload used to cost plutil plus a
JavaScript-for-Automation fallback. Windows never had that problem, and it plays
audio through a .NET assembly Node can't reach, so a Node hook there would just
have to launch PowerShell anyway.
What's deliberately not wired is as much of the design as what is.
SessionStart was in earlier versions; measured over a six-hour run it
accounted for 69% of every sound heard, in bursts as tight as four in 43
seconds—and a session starting is the one moment you're already looking at the
terminal. SubagentStop went the same way: a subagent finishing isn't a moment
that wants you back, and a turn that fans out to several of them announced every
single one. PostToolUseFailure fires on a grep that finds nothing, so it
stays alone too.
Why I built it
I kept losing minutes to a terminal I wasn't watching. Notification sounds already exist, but a generic chime tells you something happened, not what kind of something—and the difference between "this is done" and "I need you to decide" is exactly the part worth knowing without switching windows. A short spoken line carries that distinction for free.
Windows support is the most exercised; macOS and Linux are newer and have been through fewer hands. If something breaks there, open an issue—it's the fastest way to get it fixed.
One honest limitation: hooks run wherever the session runs, so a cloud session executes the command inside a remote container with no path to your speakers. If you rely on audio feedback, run Claude Code locally.
Voices by ElevenLabs.