NovaHUD questions, answered directly

NovaHUD is a paid macOS app that gives you hands-free voice control over your running Claude Code sessions. It puts a floating, always-on-top card over every other window, including the Claude Code app, with one card permanently bound to each session. You talk to a session by name, nickname, session title or orb colour, and it answers in its own distinct voice. Speech recognition, the voices and the summarising model all run locally on your Mac.

Install NovaHUD on an Apple silicon Mac running macOS 14 or later. Each running Claude Code session gets a floating card with its own voice and orb colour. Speak to a session by name, by nickname, by its session title, or by its orb colour — for example "blue orb, are you there?" — or say "everyone" to reach all of your sessions at once. NovaHUD transcribes what you said on-device, works out which session you meant, and delivers it.

Yes. Every running session gets its own floating card, permanently bound to that session, with its own voice and its own orb colour. You address one session at a time by name, nickname, session title or orb colour, or say "everyone" to reach all of them at once.

Each session is independently set to Read aloud, Summary or Quiet. Read aloud speaks the session's output back to you in full. Summary speaks the bottom line instead and attributes it by session name, which is what you want for sessions running in the background. Quiet says nothing at all but still delivers everything you send to that session.

Yes. Talk over it and it stops instantly, mid-sentence, the same way interrupting a person works. You do not need a stop command or a wake word to do it — starting to talk is the interruption.

There are four widget sizes — tiny, small, medium and large — and you choose the default that new cards start at. They are not scaled copies of each other: a tiny card shows the orb and a status dot, while a large card carries the full status line and every control, so smaller sizes drop information rather than shrinking the text.

No. NovaHUD is an independent third-party app that controls Claude Code sessions. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Anthropic.

No. Audio is transcribed on-device by whisper.cpp and never leaves your Mac. The voices are Kokoro-82M running on the Apple Neural Engine, and the summarising and routing model is a local Llama 3.2 3B via Ollama, so no stage of the voice pipeline calls out to a service. The app does talk to api.novahud.app, but only for licensing, the trial clock and sign-in — never for your audio, transcripts or code. The privacy page is specific about this.

Three. Speech recognition uses whisper.cpp. The voices are Kokoro-82M, an 82-million-parameter text-to-speech model, running on the Apple Neural Engine. Summarising and routing what you said to the right session is handled by a local Llama 3.2 3B model running under Ollama. All three run on the Mac. The pipeline is explained here.

No. There is no API key to supply and no per-token, per-minute or per-word charge for anything NovaHUD does. Every model it uses runs on your own Mac, so using it more does not cost more. There are also no rate limits.

The voice pipeline itself does not — speech recognition, the voices and the summarising model all run locally on your Mac. The app does reach api.novahud.app to check your trial or licence status and to handle sign-in, so licensing requires a connection.

Because it listens so you can speak to your sessions hands-free. macOS asks for microphone permission on first launch. Everything the microphone picks up is transcribed on that Mac by whisper.cpp and is never uploaded to a server.

NovaHUD requires an Apple silicon Mac running macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. There is no Intel Mac build, and there is no Windows or Linux version. The requirement is real rather than cautious: the local models depend on Apple silicon, and the voices in particular run on the Apple Neural Engine.

Download the DMG from novahud.app, open it, and drag NovaHUD into your Applications folder. Because the build is not notarised yet, right-click it and choose Open for the first launch. Allow microphone access when macOS asks, then open your Claude Code sessions and start talking. The 3-day free trial starts at first launch and needs no credit card. Full first-run instructions are on the download page.

The build is signed with an Apple Developer ID certificate but has not been notarised by Apple yet, so Gatekeeper blocks it on a double-click. To launch it the first time, right-click (or Control-click) NovaHUD in your Applications folder, choose Open, and confirm. macOS remembers the decision, so every launch after that is a normal double-click. Notarisation is planned.

Not yet. NovaHUD is currently a direct DMG download from novahud.app. A Mac App Store release is planned.

NovaHUD costs $5 a month. With a referral code the price is $3 a month. It starts with a 3-day free trial of the complete app, and the trial requires no credit card.

No. The 3-day free trial requires no credit card and no payment details, and it includes every feature. If you decide not to buy anything, there is nothing to cancel.

Anyone can join with just an email address — no application and no approval step — and a permanent referral code is created immediately. People who sign up with your code pay $3 a month instead of $5. You earn between $1 and $4 for each person who subscribes, depending on how many you have referred, paid once per person when their first payment clears. The email address is used to send earnings reports and the payout link. Get a code here.

Yes. Email support@novahud.app within 14 days of your purchase and you will get a full refund, no questions asked. The 3-day free trial needs no card, so you can try the whole product before paying at all.

Yes, permanently. Lifetime licences are no longer sold, but every one already issued keeps working exactly as it did, with no subscription and nothing to pay.

Email support@novahud.app. Include your macOS version, whether your Mac is Apple silicon, and what you were doing when it went wrong — that is usually enough to reproduce a bug on the first try.