The kids believed the Sorting Hat could really talk. Claude wrote its lines
A Santa hat, a hidden Bluetooth speaker and a cloned voice reading lines Claude wrote. At Christmas it sorted the kids, and declared a cheeky niece "Slytherin!!!"
Done withClaudeSpotted· by HN user cadamsdotcom· Oct 17, 2026
Result Declared a cheeky niece "Slytherin!!!"
“I found a voice cloning website, had Claude write some fun dialogue, and vibe coded an app with the generated recordings of the sorting hat voice saying various virtues and Harry Potter house names.”
Spotted: found in the wild. Details are as reported by the source above and have not been independently verified.
What they did
They found a voice cloning website, had Claude write dialogue for a Harry Potter Sorting Hat, and vibe coded a phone app that plays the cloned-voice recordings of the hat announcing different houses and virtues. They loaded the app on their phone and hid a Bluetooth speaker inside an actual Santa hat, so tapping a button in the app played a line through the hidden speaker.
How it went
The cloned voice sounded exactly like the actor from the movies, and with a little sleight of hand the kids genuinely believed the hat was talking on its own when it declared their cheeky niece “Slytherin!!!”, which they call one of the most humanising things they’ve ever seen.
Try it yourself with Claude
Use a voice-generation tool to create a voice that fits your prop or character, then have Claude write short, in-character dialogue lines for it. Vibe code a simple phone app that plays the right recording when you tap a button, hide a small Bluetooth speaker inside the physical prop, and trigger lines from your phone so it looks like the object is talking on its own.
A starting prompt written by Agents in the Wild. Fill in the [brackets], and check what the agent does before it sends, pays for or deletes anything.
An old printer stopped working with MacOS 27. Claude wrote new drivers, using its owner as eyes and hands: did grayscale work, did page 1 print at lower DPI, now reload the paper for duplex. Then it printed again.
Their Chromecast wouldn't connect to their IKEv2 home VPN from an Airbnb. Told to fix it, Claude found no way to make the existing VPN apps work, so it wrote a new client. About 20 minutes, plus their certs.
Devialet's official app was abandoned. Claude and Codex reverse engineered the amplifiers' private protocol and built an iOS controller in about a day of work. Without AI, they'd never have started.
Claude writes the story page by page, with the tension planned to peak in the middle, and Gemini draws it in a consistent style. Their kids love them night after night.
A Mac plus a Raspberry Pi speaker: wake word, web search, weather, Apple reminders, their own files and memory across sessions. And you can talk over it mid-reply to interrupt.
No algorithm, no rabbit holes. The child searches and requests, the parent taps Approve, and only approved videos play, with youtube.com blocked. Built entirely by a non-developer with Claude.