Show HN: Aloud – native macOS TTS for selected text, PDFs and screenshots ($19)

Select text in any app, open a PDF or drag over a screenshot, and Aloud reads it out loud with each word highlighted.

$19 once, yours forever. License key emailed after checkout.

Aloud at aloudapp.app is a native Mac app, $19 one-time, no subscription. It is not affiliated with aloudformac.com or aloud.work.

The harbour at six is mostly gulls and rope. Boats come in low and slow, and the first coffee of the day is poured on the quay. Nobody hurries, because the tide has already decided.

Reply by Friday, and bring the signed form with you when you come in.

Highlight words in any app and press ⌃⌥S. Aloud reads them through Accessibility, or copies and puts your clipboard back. The Read with Aloud service in the right-click menu needs no permission at all.

Running headers, footers and page numbers are left out. Hyphenated line breaks are rejoined and paragraphs that cross a page read as one. Scanned pages are recognised on your Mac.

Press ⌃⌥O, drag a box around a slide, a locked viewer or a photo of a sign, and hear what it says. Text recognition runs on the Mac.

No Dock icon, no window to manage. The reader floats above your work without taking focus, so the app you’re reading from keeps its selection.

The sentence, the page, and what gets left out.

The harbour at six is mostly gulls and rope.

One sentence at a time, with the current word in a soft, rounded highlight.

Close the reader and playback carries on.

Paper, Sepia, Night or High Contrast pages. Focus mode clears away everything but the page and dims all but the paragraph being read.

Web addresses are read as the site’s name, and citations like [12] and footnote marks are skipped. The page still shows everything.

Jump straight to any page of a PDF. Ticks on the progress bar mark where each page starts.

Reopen a recent reading from the menu bar and carry on from the sentence where you stopped.

Export any reading as an .m4a file in your chosen voice, with the same skips and pronunciations, to play anywhere.

Uses the voices installed on your Mac, including Enhanced and Premium ones you download.

A natural-sounding neural voice that runs on the Mac itself, word highlight and all. A one-time 327 MB download, on Macs with Apple silicon and macOS 15 or later.

Have an ElevenLabs or Cartesia account? Add your API key and read with their voices, word highlight and all. The key stays in your Mac’s Keychain and the service bills you directly.

Tell Aloud once how to say a name or a bit of jargon, and it says it that way wherever it appears.

S

Selection

Screenshot

Article

Paragraph under the pointer

Shortcuts you choose

Read the selection, a screenshot, the browser’s article or the paragraph under the pointer; pause, stop, skip or change speed. Rebind or turn off any of them; clashes are explained, not silent.

The harbour at six is mostly gulls and rope.

Read the article on the front tab of Safari or Chrome, without the menus, ads and captions. The browser hands over the page it already has; nothing is downloaded again.

Select text in any app, or a file in Finder, and choose Read with Aloud or Read File with Aloud from the Services menu.

Read selected text, the clipboard, a file or the browser’s article, pause, stop or change speed from the Shortcuts app, or ask Siri.

Play / Pause Control Center · macOS 26

Play and pause anywhere

Add a play-pause control to Control Center or the menu bar on macOS 26.

Stop at the end of the paragraph, or after 5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes.

Nothing selected, or no text in the image? You get a plain message, not silence.

Checks for updates once a day and asks before installing one.

Apple voices, the Kokoro voice and text recognition run on your Mac. There is no account and no telemetry in the app. Aloud goes online only to activate a license, check for updates, and download the Kokoro voice if you choose it. Text is sent to ElevenLabs or Cartesia only when you choose to read with their voices, using your own key.

This website, aloudapp.app, uses Vercel Web Analytics: cookieless, aggregate page views only. The app itself has no analytics.

Lets Aloud read the text you’ve selected in other apps. Optional: the right-click service works without it.

Only for the screenshot shortcut, so Aloud can capture the area you choose.

Only for reading a web article, so Aloud can ask Safari or Chrome for the page on its front tab.

Speechify Premium is $139 a year. Aloud is one payment for your Mac.

Secure checkout through Lemon Squeezy. License key emailed after checkout.

Yes. Buy opens checkout. After you pay, your license key is emailed.

Speak Selection is good for a quick read and Aloud doesn’t replace it. Aloud adds what it lacks: PDFs that skip headers and footers, reading from screenshots and images, and a small reader that shows the sentence and word being spoken.

The voices installed on your Mac, including the Enhanced and Premium ones you can download in System Settings. They’re all on-device. If you have an ElevenLabs or Cartesia account, you can add your own API key in Settings and read with their voices too; they bill you for what you use. On a Mac with Apple silicon and macOS 15 or later, you can also download Kokoro, a natural-sounding voice that runs on your Mac (327 MB, once).

Reading with Apple or Kokoro voices never uses the network. Aloud goes online only to activate a license, check for updates, and download the Kokoro voice if you choose it. Text is sent to ElevenLabs or Cartesia only when you choose to read with their voices.

Yes. Pages with almost no embedded text, and any image you capture or open, are recognised on your Mac. Multi-column layouts can read out of order, because the order follows how the text is found.

A Mac running macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Accessibility permission for reading selections in other apps, and Screen Recording permission for the screenshot shortcut. The Kokoro voice needs a Mac with Apple silicon and macOS 15 or later; other Macs read with Apple voices.