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What is VoiceLayer?

VoiceLayer lets Claude talk to you and listen.

When you use Claude Code, everything happens through text — you type, Claude types back. VoiceLayer adds voice to that conversation.

What Can It Do?

  • Claude speaks to you through your speakers — status updates, explanations, questions
  • You speak back through your microphone — Claude transcribes what you said and continues working
  • Everything stays local — your voice is transcribed on your machine, nothing leaves your computer

Real Examples

QA Testing a Website

You're reviewing a client's website with Claude. Instead of typing descriptions of what you see:

Claude (voice): "How does the checkout page look on mobile?"

You (voice): "The payment form is cut off on the right. And the submit button is hidden behind the keyboard."

Claude records this, moves to the next page, and keeps testing.

Hands-Free Code Review

You're walking through code changes while Claude takes notes:

Claude (voice): "I found three changes in the auth module. Want me to walk through them?"

You (voice): "Yes, start with the middleware changes."

Background Notifications

Claude finishes a long task while you're reading docs in another window:

Claude (voice): "Build complete. 47 tests passing, 2 skipped."

No need to switch back to the terminal to check.

How It Works (Simply)

  1. You add VoiceLayer to Claude Code (one line in a config file)
  2. Claude gains 5 new voice tools — announce, brief, consult, converse, and think
  3. When Claude wants to speak, it calls the voice tool
  4. When Claude needs your input, it speaks a question, records your answer, and reads the transcription

The entire flow happens in your terminal. No browser, no app, no account needed.

What You Need

  • A Mac or Linux computer with speakers and a microphone
  • Claude Code installed
  • Bun (a JavaScript runtime — one command to install)
  • sox (for microphone recording — one command to install)
  • edge-tts (for text-to-speech — one command to install)
  • whisper.cpp (for speech-to-text — optional but recommended for fully local operation)

Total setup time: about 5 minutes. See the Quick Start guide.

Is It Free?

Yes. VoiceLayer is open source (Apache-2.0 license). All voice processing runs locally on your machine. The only optional cloud component is Wispr Flow for speech-to-text, which requires an API key — but the default whisper.cpp backend is fully local and free.

VoiceLayer is part of the Golems ecosystem — three open-source MCP servers for memory (BrainLayer), voice (VoiceLayer), and orchestration (cmuxLayer).