hear

private, free, open source >3

Books and articles, spoken.

Find a public-domain book, open an article or research paper from the web, or bring your own EPUB or PDF.

Searches Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg.

Books worth hearing

Opening the shelves…

Voice generation, EPUB and PDF reading, your library, and your progress all stay on this device.

Every article stays attributed and linked to its publisher. Books remain linked to Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg.

Reading order

Choose a chapter

Listening

Voice & speed

Voice engine

Natural voices run entirely on this device and download only when you press play.

Selected model: System voice · instant · no download

Voices installed on this device.

1×

Natural pace

On this device

Storage & privacy

No text or audio is ever sent to a speech service.

Voice models

—

Checking saved models…

Generated audio

Checking local storage…

Reset Hear

Removes your library, listening progress, voice choices, models, and generated audio.

How the natural voice works

Kitten and Kokoro are open speech models that run inside your browser. Hear downloads a model only after you choose it and press play, then generates each sentence on this device a little ahead of where you are listening.

WebGPU is tried only after you choose it and press play; if it fails, Hear uses the standard WASM engine.

Kokoro model card ↗

One-time download

Download this voice?

— MB

Preparing the selected local model…

Checking available browser storage…

The voice runs entirely on this device and works offline afterwards. Text is never sent to a speech service.

One-time setup

Send articles to Hear

iPhone & iPad share sheet

Send any public article straight to Hear from Safari or any app that shares links.

Add to Apple Shortcuts

Then open an article and choose Share → “send to hear!”

Safari bookmarklet on Mac

  1. Show Safari’s Favorites Bar with ⌘⇧B.
  2. Drag the button below into the bar.
  3. Click it on the article you want to hear.
Listen with Hear

On iPhone or iPad without Shortcuts, bookmark this page, edit the bookmark, and replace its address with the code below.

Another public edition

A readable copy is available

Choose the public repository you want Hear to open.

Hear shows the repository and keeps the original page attached for attribution.