Contents
What is Hands-Free Mode?
Hands-Free Mode lets you follow a task without repeatedly touching the phone:
- The coach reads the current step aloud.
- Say “Next”, “Go on” or “Continue” to mark it complete.
- The coach moves on and reads the next step.
Why can hearing the coach help?
While testing a tidying task, I found that Coach W’s voice and encouragement stayed in my mind afterwards. I ended up doing the task I had only intended to use for testing.
The original article explores four ways to think about that experience:
- The confidence heuristic. A steady pace and assured delivery can feel more convincing than reading the same words in a hesitant internal voice. Sounding confident is not the same as being correct, but delivery affects how a message feels.
- Emotional mirroring. Hearing a calm, energetic voice can help you take on some of that mood. The Chinese article discusses this through the idea of mirror neurons.
- Less reliance on reading. Spoken guidance gives another way to receive the step when scanning and processing text feels difficult. The pace also makes it harder to skim past a useful detail.
- A sense of company. A natural voice can feel more like someone accompanying you than a paragraph on a screen.
These ideas explain the design intent: make the next action feel more immediate and easier to follow.
Details and tips
Cached speech
After a step has been read once, its audio can be reused without generating and downloading it again. Replay is faster and does not use another generation allowance.
Preloading
While the current step plays, PlanCoach prepares the next step’s audio so the transition feels smoother.
Speaker icon
The speaker’s outlined or filled appearance indicates whether the next step’s audio is cached. It flashes while loading and animates while playing.
Parentheses
Text inside parentheses is omitted from speech. You can use this intentionally when making a coach to keep an on-screen hint from being read aloud.
Read one step
Long-press a step to have it read individually.
Repeat the current step
Say “Repeat” or “Say again” if you have forgotten the current instruction while working on it. The original article introduced this improvement for version 2.0.6.
How the feature evolved
Hands-Free Mode began with a community request: after finally getting moving, touching the phone again can be inconvenient and introduce another barrier.
The first version was followed by a request for a more natural, human-sounding voice. Adding that voice service made the experience better, but generation cost was high compared with a lifetime purchase, so the early implementation had a daily limit of 25 utterances.
People then asked for a higher allowance. Rather than introducing another paid membership tier, version 1.4.0 added the Growth System and Grocery Store. Completing tasks and checking in earns Coffee Beans, which can be exchanged for more Hands-Free Mode allowance.
The repeat command came from another practical request: after spending a while on a step, it is easy to forget exactly what the coach said. The feature keeps improving through these small, specific pieces of feedback.