AutoGreet
requires MWSE

This MWSE mod displays follower greetings as messageboxes as you enter new cells or make quest progress. 

Here is a video to get an idea of how it works: companions display their currently filtered greeting in the message box as you move around, without the player stopping to manually greet them. This is not a voice acting mod or anything, it just lets you read greetings without stopping. Example:



So for companions with lots of ongoing quest or location commentary (Julan, Strider's Nest companions, Arvesa, etc) implemented as greetings, they can make themselves heard passively rather than waiting to be spoken to.

Note that this is not a replacement for all normal dialogue: commentary implemented through topics replies will not be displayed, and greetings which trigger scripts in the results box must be accessed normally. In particular, you should talk to your friends manually for greetings which appear to be related to custom quests, but the message boxes are often appropriate for simple location or vanilla quest commentary.

How it works:

On cell change or journal update, companions will display their currently filtered greeting after a brief pause. By default, only one companion will speak at a time (this can be changed in the MCM, but allowing everyone to speak can result in a cluttered screen, and more than 3 at a time will push messageboxes off). The greetings are limited to Greeting 0, Greeting 1, and Greeting 2--generally, ID-specific greetings are filtered here and all companions I know of put their dialogue in these tabs.

By default, companions will not repeat the same line per session, meaning if you re-enter the same cell repeatedly you won't get a messagebox saying the same thing over and over, and if the companion lacks commentary for a specific situation you'll only see their most broadly filtered greetings once. This can also be changed in the MCM if you prefer to permit repeat lines.

Also, by default, the mod only does its thing for a whitelist of companion NPCs which I think have a relatively broad amount of location/quest commentary implemented as greetings:

Andren, Iona, Amelie, and Lucan from The Strider's Nest
Arvesa from An Armiger's Tale
Constance from Thief Companion Constance
Sabrina Cortician from Into the Void
Julan and Shani from Julan Ashlander Companion
Johnny or Synda from The Underground
Yashga
Belial
Jasmine

The whitelist can be disabled completely if I missed something, or you can add npc IDs to it in the lua file. Disabling it entirely might only be annoying if you're using a generic follower and also enabling repeats, causing them to say the same line on every cell change. But as long as repeats are disabled even generic followers can be fine.

Some companions have a lot of commentary implemented it outside of greetings, and aren't compatible with this mod--e.g. Vaba-Amus does a lot of commentary as message boxes on other NPCs, since he can be a hat as well as a companion. In addition, some of Andren's commentary doesn't display correctly, since he uses the results box (for a minority of his lines) as well. Julan does some commentary in topics so you may wish to check with him periodically, but most of his commentary is in greetings.

Performance note: if you have a lot of dialogue mods you might notice a small hang before companions speak. Basically, dialogue gets slower if there are more entries, and getting the greetings is sort of like opening the dialogue box. If you never notice any dialogue lag in the normal menu you won't notice it in this mod either, but if your dialogue box is slow getting the greetings for this mod will hang a bit too. Generally it is too small to be particularly annoying, but you may wish to disable the mod if you find it disruptive.