[jfoutz]

osx comes with a command "say" which is a text to speech tool. I'd do things like make && say "build complete" || say "compile failed" with different voices I thought were funny. generally worked great.

One day, I stepped away and had a particularly intimidating voice say "your build has failed" and apparently knocked out my headphones. I came back just in time to hear that, and see a couple coworkers jump at the sound.

After that, I was much more consistent at disabling sound when I stepped away. I got a little teasing about that day, but generally it worked great.

[scns]

This is possible in Linux as well. The program is called speech-ng IIRC.

[boogies]

espeak-ng / espeak. But notify-send(1) mitigates the potential for scaring your coworkers.

[mrlemke]

I use espeak and it works on Termux too.

[defer]

I used a similar approach before working mostly remote, now I just curl to pushbullet to get the notification wherever I might be working.