Aloud

Rest your eyes and keep reading. Select text in any app, press ⌃⌥Space, and a natural voice reads it to you. The voice runs on your Mac.

Download for Mac Source on GitHub

Free · macOS 15 or later on Apple Silicon · Install steps

Aloud runs on a Mac. Open quietpixel.dev/aloud on your Mac to install it.

The long walk home

Most of us read all day: email, articles, reports, the small print at the end of a contract. Our eyes do the work, and by evening they are tired.

Listening is a different kind of reading. You can lean back, look out of the window, or make a cup of tea, and the words still reach you. That is what Aloud is for.

Select a sentence, then press the shortcut.

This demo shows what Aloud does, without sound. The real voice is on your Mac only.

0.3 sfrom shortcut to the first word, on an M2
0network connections. The voice model is inside the app.
20natural US voices, male and female

Anywhere you read

One shortcut for every app

Aloud reads the selection through the Accessibility API. If an app does not share it, such as Slack or VS Code, Aloud copies the selection for a moment and puts your clipboard back.

Voices

Pick the voice you like

Twenty US English voices from the open Kokoro model. Choose one from the menu and you hear a short sample. Set the reading speed in the same menu.

Aloud's menu open below its waveform icon in the menu bar, while it reads a selected paragraph: Pause, Stop, Voice, Speed, Change Hotkey, Launch at Login and Quit

Out of the way

Just a menu bar icon

No Dock icon and no window. The icon turns into a moving waveform the moment you press the shortcut, so you know Aloud heard you.

Click it to pause, stop, replay the last text, change the voice or the speed, or set your own shortcut.

Install Aloud

  1. Download the disk image. Open it and drag Aloud to your Applications folder.
  2. Open Aloud. It is not notarized by Apple, so macOS stops it the first time. Close the warning.
  3. Open System Settings › Privacy & Security, find the message about Aloud, and click Open Anyway. You do this only once.
  4. When Aloud asks, turn it on in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility. Aloud uses this permission only to read the text you select.
  5. Select text in any app and press ⌃⌥Space.

The first launch takes about 10 seconds to prepare the voices. The download is large because the voice model is inside the app.