[johnmatthewtennant]

Summary

Why. A host that knows when its agent is working, such as the Buzz Berd Call plugin, has to play its own Pop and Purr today. berd-call's session already owns that cadence (Pop every five seconds while working, Purr while waiting, quiet during speech), but nothing in a berd-call start call can tell it the agent's status. So the menu bar can't turn the sounds off, and every host reimplements them.

What.

• berd-call settings --conversation-status working|waiting reports the agent's status to the running call. The call plays nothing until it is first set, so a terminal call whose agent never reports stays silent.
• berd-call settings --status-sounds off|working|working-and-waiting, and a new Status Sounds submenu in the menu bar (Off, While Working, While Working and Waiting), choose what plays. The mode is saved with the call's other settings as status_sounds. The default is working, matching the session's existing default.
• status reports statusSounds and conversationStatus. Both survive settings --restart: the replacement session is sent the last reported status as soon as it is ready.

Related issue

Revives the status-sound controls from #346, now driven by host-reported status instead of a guess from the transcript.

Testing

Live call from this branch's binary, with its own settings file and port (microphone muted):

export BERD_CALL_SETTINGS_FILE=$(mktemp -d)/settings.json
berd-call start --port 5363 --stream --voice Aaron --language en-US &
berd-call settings --port 5363 --muted true
berd-call status --port 5363                                        # statusSounds: working, conversationStatus: null (silent)
berd-call settings --port 5363 --conversation-status working        # conversationStatus: working (Pop repeats)
berd-call settings --port 5363 --status-sounds working-and-waiting  # saved: "status_sounds": "working-and-waiting"
berd-call settings --port 5363 --conversation-status waiting        # conversationStatus: waiting (Purr repeats)
berd-call settings --port 5363 --restart --voice Aaron --language en-US
                                                                    # still working-and-waiting / waiting after the restart
berd-call stop --port 5363

Observed statusSounds / conversationStatus at each step: working/null, working/working, working-and-waiting/working, working-and-waiting/waiting, then working-and-waiting/waiting after the restart, with the mode written to the settings file and nothing on stderr.

Unit coverage: the host holds status until one is reported, sends it with the mode, commits it before the session acknowledges, and saves only the mode; the menu shows the call's mode and sends the same status_sounds request as the CLI; the settings parser accepts only the documented values.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[johnmatthewtennant]

Closing as a duplicate of #400, which another session of mine opened first with the same design.