What is hey-claude?

Hey Claude is a macOS app that lets you open or talk to Claude Code using your voice instead of typing. Say "Hey Claude" out loud and the app opens a Claude Code session in your editor or terminal. If you follow the wake phrase with a question or instruction, that text is carried in as the starting prompt. It is an unofficial community project, not made by or affiliated with Anthropic. The app lives in the notch area at the top of your screen on MacBooks and shows a small animated mascot that changes state while it listens, processes your speech, and waits. You can choose a different face and color for the mascot in settings. As an alternative to the wake word, you can hold a key (default is the right Option key) to trigger push-to-talk, speak, then release. Pressing Escape cancels either mode. All audio processing happens on your device. The wake word detection and speech-to-text transcription run locally using on-device AI models and nothing is uploaded to a server. The app itself has no telemetry or cloud connection. The only data that leaves your Mac is whatever you send through Claude Code once it opens, which talks to Anthropic as it normally would. Installation requires an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 14.4 or later, with the Claude Code command-line tool already installed and available in your terminal. A pre-built installer file is available from the releases page, so no programming knowledge is required to use it. On first launch, macOS will ask for microphone access and, depending on which terminal or editor you use, a few other permissions. The app can open Claude Code inside VS Code, Cursor, iTerm2, Ghostty, and macOS Terminal. The project is released under the GPL-3.0 license, meaning anyone who modifies and distributes it must share their changes under the same terms.