ChatGPT/App/Desktop/Q/How can I turn off the notification sound when a response finishes?

• How can I turn off the notification sound when a response finishes?

  • AI Answer

    • Short answer: the app's own setting governs when the turn-completion alert fires, not whether it makes a noise — Settings → Notifications → turn completion notifications → Never removes the ding along with the banner. To keep the banner and lose only the sound, silence it at the OS level instead: System Settings → Notifications → ChatGPT → off Play sound for notification.

    • The two levers

      • Lever	Turns off	Keeps
        App: turn completion notifications → Never	the sound and the banner	nothing — no alert at all
        MacOS: Play sound for notification → off	the sound only	the banner and the Notification Center entry

      • There is no sound-only toggle inside the app. If the banner itself is welcome and only the ding is not, the OS lever is the one that does the job.

    • In the app

      • Cmd , opens settings; the section is Notifications.
      • Answer/Official from Notifications: you "choose whether turn-completion alerts appear never, only while ChatGPT is in the background, or always." Only while in the background is the middle setting worth knowing — it leaves the alert in place for long-running work you have tabbed away from, and stops it firing while you sit watching the response arrive.
      • Permission and question notifications are documented as separate controls, so turning turn-completion off does not suppress a Codex approval prompt.

    • In macOS

      • System Settings → Notifications → ChatGPT, then turn off Play sound for notification. Alert Style → None goes further and drops the banner while still logging the alert to Notification Center.
      • This is also the more dependable lever. The app's turn-completion alert has been reported as unreliable in both directions after the Codex → ChatGPT app consolidation — openai/codex#36169 has macOS accepting the notification as banner + sound while the user perceives neither. An OS-level mute does not depend on the app's own setting landing correctly.

    • Account notifications are a different setting

      • The Notifications pane on the account side governs push for work that finishes while you are away — ChatGPT/Task runs and ChatGPT/Deep Research reports. Those toggles reach phone and browser push, not the desktop app's local turn-completion alert, and neither setting affects the other.

    • Scope of this answer

      • Setting names read from OpenAI's published documentation in September 2026. The macOS notification toggles are standard per-app options rather than anything ChatGPT-specific.