Making Claude Code speak responses with a Stop hook

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:00:00 +0000

TL;DR: I wanted Claude Code to read out each response through say on macOS so I could step away and listen instead of watching the terminal. Four bugs got in the way: the hook was on the wrong event, tac does not exist on macOS, the Stop hook fires before Claude flushes the transcript, and pkill say clobbered speech from other sessions. A 1-second sleep, jq -rs, and a per-session PID file fixed it. I also trim the message to the last non-empty line and strip markdown, so long replies don’t drone on and URLs don’t get spoken character by character.

Hooks on brtkwr.com

Making Claude Code speak responses with a Stop hook