Gemini CLI Notifications: How to Get a Sound or Alert When Gemini Finishes

Gemini CLI is happy to grind through a refactor or a long test run for ten minutes straight — and to say absolutely nothing when it's done. No sound, no banner, no flash. So you either sit there watching tokens stream by, or you switch to something useful and find out fifteen minutes too late that it finished — or that it stopped almost immediately to ask you a question.

The fix is a spectrum, from a built-in experimental setting to extensions to a native app that needs no configuration at all. Here's every practical way to make Gemini CLI notify you when it's done, in increasing order of polish.

Step one: the built-in experimental notification setting

Recent Gemini CLI builds ship an experimental notifications feature. Type /settings inside a session, find the notifications entry, and switch it on. With it enabled, Gemini CLI signals session completion — on macOS that means an audible cue when a run finishes.

Under the hood it uses OSC 9 terminal notifications where the terminal supports them. If yours doesn't, Gemini CLI falls back to the classic terminal bell (BEL), which most terminals render as a taskbar flash or a system alert sound. That distinction matters in practice: whether you get a crisp notification or a faint bell depends as much on your terminal emulator as on Gemini itself. iTerm2, WezTerm, Kitty and recent Windows Terminal builds handle OSC 9 well; the stock macOS Terminal is stingier.

The setting is genuinely useful and takes thirty seconds — but it's completion-only, it's experimental (so its shape may change between releases), and it can't tell you the more important thing: that Gemini has paused and is waiting for your approval.

Step two: extensions, for sounds with more control

Gemini CLI has an extension system, and the community has already built notification extensions on top of it. Two worth knowing:

• notify-sound plays an audio cue on hook events — including task completion — and works cross-platform on macOS, Linux and Windows using each system's built-in audio player, so there's nothing extra to install.
• chime takes the opposite approach: it exposes a chime tool the model itself can call, so Gemini plays a completion sound when it finishes a long-running operation.

Extensions get you per-event sounds and cross-platform coverage, at the cost of maintaining one more moving part per machine. If you've read our Codex CLI notifications guide, this will feel familiar: every agent CLI grows the same ecosystem of hook scripts and audio helpers, and they all share the same weakness — each tool, each machine, each teammate needs its own setup.

Step three: the terminal-level safety net

Independent of Gemini entirely, your terminal can watch for silence. iTerm2 can alert you when a quiet tab starts producing output again; tmux's monitor-silence flags a window when output stops — a decent proxy for "the agent is waiting on you." These are blunt instruments, but they catch the waiting-for-input case the built-in setting misses, and they work for every CLI tool you'll ever run.

The zero-config option: a native notifier

If the previous sections read like a to-do list you don't want, this is the shortcut. AI Done Now watches Gemini CLI natively — install it once and you get a proper macOS notification, sound plus clickable banner, both when Gemini finishes and when it stops to wait for your input. No settings surgery, no extension management, no per-machine scripts.

The same app covers Claude Code, Codex CLI and Cursor, which is the quiet advantage: most of us now bounce between two or three agents in a day, and one notifier with one behaviour beats three half-configured hook scripts. The end state is the workflow we described in a workflow that doesn't involve watching the terminal — kick off the task, walk away, and trust the tap on the shoulder.

Which setup should you pick?

• Thirty seconds, done-sound only: flip on the experimental notifications entry in /settings.
• Custom sounds, cross-platform, happy to tinker: the notify-sound or chime extensions.
• Done + waiting-for-input banners across all your agents, zero maintenance: AI Done Now for Gemini CLI.

The common thread: an agent you have to watch isn't saving you attention, just keystrokes. Give Gemini CLI a voice — any of the three above — and it goes from a tool you babysit to a colleague who knocks on your door exactly when needed.