Become the person everyone wants to talk to.

Cue is a real-time conversation coaching app that helps you become a better listener. It analyzes your voice acoustics during live conversations — not your words — and delivers subtle coaching nudges to help you be more present, more empathetic, and more effective.

The Listening Problem

The average person receives 12 years of writing instruction, 6-8 years of reading instruction, and 1-2 years of speaking instruction. Years of listening instruction? Zero. Despite listening being the communication skill we use most — 45% of our communication time.

The result: in most conversations, we're composing our response while the other person is still talking. We're not absorbing. We're not empathizing. We're not present. Everyone does this.

How Cue Works

Cue runs during any conversation — a video call, a phone call, or even an in-person meeting with your phone nearby. It listens to your microphone, analyzes your vocal signals in real time, and delivers coaching nudges when it detects patterns that indicate you're not fully present.

What Cue Measures

• Pace — how fast you're speaking. Rushing signals anxiety. Steady signals confidence.
• Energy — how loud and intense your voice is. Too high overwhelms. Too low disengages.
• Vocal Edge — pressed phonation in your voice detected through spectral analysis. Vocal-tract tightness, not emotional state.
• Talk-Listen Ratio — how much you talk vs. how much you listen. The best conversations happen at 40:60.
• Pause Behavior — whether you pause strategically (a sign of active listening) or rush to fill silence.
• Connection Score — Cue's estimate of how heard the other person feels, based on your vocal patterns.

What Cue Delivers

When a pattern crosses a threshold, Cue delivers a nudge — a brief, Socratic coaching prompt that appears on screen:

"You're speeding up. What's driving that?"

"That pause was brave. Stay in it."

"What do they think about this?"

Nudges are questions, not commands. They respect your intelligence. They help you notice what's happening in the conversation so you can make a conscious choice about how to respond.

The Science Behind Cue

Cue's coaching engine is grounded in peer-reviewed research spanning decades:

• Carl Rogers (1951) — Active listening and client-centered therapy. The foundation of empathic communication.
• Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson (1974) — Turn-taking in conversation. Normal gaps are 200ms. Strategic pauses of 1-3 seconds signal respect.
• Huang et al., Harvard (2017) — People who ask more follow-up questions are rated as more likeable. Asking questions is the highest-leverage listening behavior.
• Uri Hasson, Princeton (2010) — Neural coupling: when you truly listen, your brain activity mirrors the speaker's. Better listening = deeper brain-to-brain connection.
• Klaus Scherer (2003) — Vocal prosody encodes emotion. Pitch, pace, and energy reliably predict emotional state with 60-70% accuracy from acoustics alone.

Privacy by Architecture

Cue never records audio. Raw audio samples are analyzed in real time and immediately discarded. Only numerical signal scores (tension: 42, pace: 135 wpm) are stored locally on your device. Nothing is transmitted to any server. No transcription. No cloud processing. Everything runs 100% on-device.

Who Cue Is For

• Leaders and managers who want their teams to feel heard
• Sales professionals who know that listening closes deals (top reps listen 57% of the time — Gong.io data)
• Therapists and coaches who practice active listening as a profession
• Partners and parents who want deeper relationships at home
• Anyone who's ever been told "you're not listening" and wants to change that

Coaching Profiles

Cue comes with 7 coaching profiles, each calibrated to a different listening archetype:

• Balanced — even-paced, 40% talk ratio, good for most conversations
• Lex Fridman — deep, slow, contemplative. 25% talk ratio. Long pauses welcome.
• Tim Ferriss — curious, structured, rapid follow-up questions
• Joe Rogan — high energy, fast-paced, more talk time allowed
• Terry Gross — minimal talk, maximum empathy, mastery of silence
• NVC (Nonviolent Communication) — listen for feelings and needs behind words
• Negotiator — Fisher & Ury principles, interests over positions

Adaptive Intelligence

Cue learns who you are over time. It tracks your vocal patterns across sessions, identifies your tendencies (rushing, monologuing, tension), and adapts its coaching to focus on the skills you need most. Skills you've mastered get fewer nudges. Areas where you struggle get more attention. The result: coaching that gets smarter every time you practice.

Try Cue

Free. No signup required. No audio recorded. Just open Cue, start a conversation, and find out if you're a good listener.

Cue is built by Nathan Vajdos. Questions? hello@usecue.app