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Show HN: Orate – On-device neural text-to-speech queue for Mac
Hey friends! Brad here - long time HN user, founder, engineer (Coinbase, Soothe, Jeevz, Release, Hired, GrowthX, etc)...
I have been struggling recently with too many tabs, emails, articles, etc sitting unread while I swap between Claude code sessions all day. So I decided to build Orate to help me work through the backlog by listening to it all like I would a podcast.
Orate allows you to select any text on your screen and keyboard shortcut it to a listening queue where it gets processed using the latest + greatest TTS AI models, and then read back to you in a mostly-natural sounding voice. Orate works fully on-device and offline. Whatever you pass to it stays yours. It's native, lives in your menu bar, and supports things like tagging, system playback controls, speed adjustment, and more. There's also an optional HD-voice tier that uses Chatterbox instead of Kokoro which ships with it for more expressive TTS.
I'm also burnt out on being chipped away at little by little with a subscription for everything, so it's just $4.99 one time and you own it forever. Use the code HACKERNEWS for $3 off, putting you at just $1.99.
As AI helped me nail down - it's "read it later, for your ears". I hope you like it!
If you have any questions, want more details, notice any bugs, or have an idea for something cool to add, just ping me! I plan to launch a companion iOS app soon to sync text between your devices as well.
It's currently Mac only, but I might whip up a Windows version if the response is good.
Cheers!
- monkellipse 2mo agoCool, I’ll give it a try! OCR for printed stuff, device sync and character voices (for fiction) would be killer.
- bherms 2mo agoThe Chatterbox HD plugin actually does AI voice cloning, but I didn't expose it yet. That's a great idea to see if it can do different voices and I could clone some popular ones. Device sync is coming soon!
- gaiya 2mo ago[dead]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- greggh 2mo agoIt would be nice to have a sample of the audio quality and voice(s) it uses on the website so we know what it will sound like. -- Edit: I installed it, ran it and got the first time wizard, granted permissions and hit continue and it just exits without any other message or screen. It isn't in the menu bar. I run it again and get the same. It says the permissions are granted already the second time though. I like the interface on the website a lot, so I would love to use this. Thoughts?
- bherms 2mo agoCan you paste your system specs here for me? It's running for me just fine and on a few other laptops here, but I am curious if there's something on your laptop that might be giving issues... It does require Mac w/ Apple M1+. Happy to debug and get it working for you!
- greggh 2mo agoMac mini m4 16gb, latest updates.
- bherms 2mo agoOn it! I’ll ping you when I have a culprit
- bherms 2mo agoOkay, 0.1.9 is out now and should fix the issue... I also added a way to report crashes, so IF it still gives you issues, let me know and please report the crash
- greggh 2mo agoI had to click Skip to get past the intro screens, then the app comes up. I went to settings and pasted in my license, clicking activate says it's not valid. It is the key on my polar.sh account and I copy/pasted it so I know it's correct. Then it crashed.
- 2mo ago
- womble2 2mo agoSeems great, a keyboard shortcut for reading any text is nice and frictionless. I'd love to see a Linux version.
- drcongo 2mo agoSurprised at how little traction this has gotten here, I reckon I could get a lot of use out of this once the iOS app comes along - Instapaper that I can use while walking the dogs.
- bherms 2mo agoYep, I'm on it... Should be ready in about a week!
- PorterBHall 2mo agoI use a podcast manager to listen to all of my podcasts. Do you have a feature that would allow me to syndicate a feed to my podcast app?
- bherms 2mo agoNot yet but that's a great idea! I can work on that! I'm also about a week away from an iOS app
- manianaai 2mo ago[dead]
- NucleusOS 2mo ago[flagged]