Notifications & mobile
Key takeaway: Heygents tells you the moment a run finishes, needs approval, or fails. Four events - run finished, needs approval, task done and skill used - each have their own toggle, sound and optional phone push. Web push reaches your phone even when the browser is closed, and on iPhone it requires installing Heygents to the home screen first.
AI runs take minutes, not seconds. The point of notifications in Heygents is that you can start something, walk away, and be told the moment it finishes, needs your approval, or fails - whether you left the tab open on your desk or put your phone in your pocket.
The four events
Everything Heygents notifies you about maps to one of four events, and each one has its own independent on/off switch, its own sound, and its own optional phone push:
- Run finished - any chat turn, or a fix launched from a task card, has completed.
- Needs approval / popup question - a run has paused and is waiting on you: either a tool-permission Allow/Deny decision, or a multiple-choice question the agent asked mid-run.
- Task done - a scheduled chat or an automation finished its work in the background.
- Skill used - Claude invoked a skill during a run. The cue announces the skill by name, and defaults to the spoken announcement rather than a tone.
On top of these, a failed run always plays a fixed error buzz. That one is not configurable, deliberately: a failure is the one thing you never want to miss because a toggle was off.
Per-event sounds
Open Settings → Notifications from the left sidebar (or the hamburger menu on a phone). Each event gets a row with a toggle and a sound picker. The picker offers a library of short synthesised tones, plus a Spoken (project name) option that reads the event out loud using your browser's speech engine - for example "Task completed, my-project". Spoken cues are the practical choice when several projects are running at once, because you learn which one finished without looking at the screen.
A single volume slider applies to every cue. Your choices are stored in your own browser, so two people using the same Heygents can have completely different sound setups.
The approval cue can also repeat. Because a paused run does nothing until you answer, its row has a "Repeat every N until you respond" checkbox (on by default, with intervals of 30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes or 5 minutes). The cue replays on that interval until you answer the prompt, dismiss it, or the run ends.
One practical note about browsers: audio cannot play until the page has seen a real interaction. Click anywhere in Heygents once after loading it and every later cue will be audible.
The notification bell
The bell sits in the utility header at the top of the app. It collects recent events - runs that finished, runs waiting for approval, tasks completed - into a popover you can scan at a glance, and clicking an entry jumps straight to the conversation or task it belongs to. On phones the bell is pinned to the far left of the header next to the hamburger menu, so it is always within thumb reach.
The bell uses the same status colours as the rest of the app: orange for working, blue for waiting on you, green for finished and not yet seen, red for failed. Those colours are consistent across the chat tab strip, History, the project lists and the notification surfaces, so a colour always means the same thing wherever you see it.
Web push to your phone
In-app sounds only help while a Heygents tab is open. Web push covers the rest: Heygents can send a real OS notification to your phone even when the browser is closed.
To turn it on, open Settings → Notifications and press Enable phone push on this device. The browser asks for OS permission; accept it. Then tick Also push to my phone on each event you actually want on your phone. Every push event is opt-in and off by default, so nothing arrives until you ask for it.
There is also a separate Also push failures to my phone switch. A failed run pushes if its own event is enabled or if this switch is on - which gives you a useful "only tell me when something breaks" setup: leave the individual events off, and turn this one on.
Push is per device. Enabling it on your laptop does not enable it on your phone, and vice versa, so run through the Enable step once on each device you want pinged.
Installing Heygents on a phone home screen
Heygents is an installable web app. Adding it to your home screen gives you a full-screen app icon with no browser chrome, and on iPhone and iPad it is also a hard requirement for push: web push only works from an installed app, never from a Safari tab.
- iPhone / iPad - open Heygents in Safari, tap the Share button, choose Add to Home Screen, then confirm. Launch Heygents from that new icon and only then enable push in Settings.
- Android - open Heygents in Chrome and either accept the install prompt or choose Install app / Add to Home screen from the browser menu.
- Desktop - Chrome and Edge offer an install button in the address bar, which gives Heygents its own window.
Tapping a push notification opens Heygents directly on the relevant conversation, so you can read the answer and reply without hunting for the chat.
When a tab is open versus closed
Heygents tries to do the sensible thing in both cases. If a Heygents window is already focused when an event fires, the OS notification is suppressed and the page plays the in-app cue instead, so you do not get a banner for something you are already looking at. If no window is focused, you get the OS notification with your phone's own notification sound. A background notification cannot play a custom Heygents sound - that is a browser platform limit, not a setting.
The mobile layout and tab bar
Below roughly 1000 pixels wide - which covers phones, portrait tablets and landscape phones - Heygents switches to a phone-style shell: a fixed-height column with the stats header on top, one full-screen view in the middle, and a bottom tab bar. The tabs are:
- Home - the dashboard, and the default landing view.
- Projects - the project list as a real scrollable page.
- Chat - the AI conversation for the selected project.
- Detail - the selected project's Info, Plan, Tasks and Automations tabs.
Two of those tabs carry green badges for fresh activity: Chat shows the number of chats that finished in the background but have not been opened yet, and the tasks view shows how many tasks were solved in the last 24 hours. Between the tab bar and the content sits a project switcher pill, docked just above the tabs so it stays in thumb reach - it replaces the desktop sidebar and keeps the active project one tap away from any view.
The mobile chat composer is tuned for touch: a 16px input field so iOS Safari does not zoom when you focus it, finger-sized buttons, and the same unified provider, model, mode and effort selector as the desktop. Backgrounding the app is treated as a temporary disconnection, not a cancellation - the run keeps going on the server, each finished turn is saved, and returning to the app reloads the history and reattaches to anything still live.
Start a run, then put your phone away
Heygents keeps the run going on the server and pings you when it needs you. Enable push once per device and Heygents becomes something you check, not something you sit and watch.
Open Heygents →If notifications go quiet
- No sound at all - click once anywhere in the page. Browsers block audio until the page has seen an interaction.
- No push on iPhone - confirm you launched Heygents from the home-screen icon, not from a Safari tab, and that OS notification permission is granted for it.
- Push worked and then stopped everywhere - the server's push keys were probably regenerated, which invalidates every existing device subscription. Open Settings → Notifications and press Enable again on each device; the panel detects a stale subscription and tells you to re-subscribe.
- Push never worked on this Heygents - push keys may not be configured on the server. The panel still renders, but nothing sends. See Hosting, backups & troubleshooting.
- Some events arrive, others do not - each event is a separate toggle, and phone push is a second toggle on top of it. Check both rows.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to keep a browser tab open?
No. Runs are detached on the server and survive a closed tab, a lost connection or a locked phone, and notifications are how you find out they finished. In-app sounds only play while a Heygents tab is open, so web push is what covers you when the browser is closed and your phone is in your pocket.
Are notification settings shared between users?
Sound choices are stored in your own browser and push subscriptions are per device, so two people using the same Heygents can have completely different setups. Which events are enabled for push is a stored per-user preference, so that part follows you rather than the machine. Run the Enable step once on each device you want pinged.
Can I get pushed only when something fails?
Yes. Leave the individual event pushes off and turn on the separate Also push failures to my phone switch. A failed run pushes if its own event is enabled or if that switch is on, which gives you a useful "only tell me when something breaks" setup. A failed run also always plays a fixed error buzz in the app.