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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Local Reader

I made an on-device AI TTS extension using the WebGPU implementation of Kokoro TTS, the highest-rated open source TTS according to TTS arena. It runs model inference fully in your browser, so no server costs and it's secure. It was pretty easy to get the TTS working since the hard part (inference in javascript/webAssembly/webGPU) was done for me. I added some quality of life features on top: click to jump to a different paragraph, alt j & k for down and up, speed control, and voices (though the default voice has the highest quality). I made the extension mainly because I noticed…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.

  1. 1

    Kitten TTS is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We are excited to launch a preview of our smallest model, which is less than 25 MB. This model has 15M parameters. This release supports English text-to-speech applications in eight voices: four male and four female. The model is quantized to int8 + fp16, and it uses onnx for runtime. The model is designed to run literally anywhere eg. raspberry pi, low-end smartphones, wearables, browsers etc. No GPU required! We're releasing this to give early users a sense of the latency and voices…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    Inworld TTSfree tier, from $25/mo▲318

    Hey HN, this is Igor, one of the engineers behind Inworld Runtime, which we're releasing today in public preview. We built it to solve the common problem we and our customers had: engineers spend more time on AI ops and plumbing than on actual feature development. This was often due to the challenge of using Python for I/O-bound, high-concurrency workloads and complexity maintaining pipelines with streams that use always-changing ML models. Our solution is a high-performance runtime written in C++ with the core idea of defining AI logic as graphs. For instance, a basic voice-to-voice…

    2025 · inworld.ai · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    The voice for your real-time AI applications

    2025 · kyutai.org · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    Audeus▲130

    Read Aloud PDFs, GDocs, Email, & More - Works Where You Do

    2024 · audeus.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5
    MARS5 TTS▲489

    Open-source, insanely prosodic text-to-speech model

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Add AI text-to-speech to your website with WebsiteVoice. Easily integrate a TTS reader and let visitors listen to content in natural AI voices.

    2019 · websitevoice.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Convert text to speech with natural voices free online

    2024 · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    Kokori▲101

    Transform text to speech with a powerful macOS app

    Jan 2026 · kokori.app · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Real-time text-to-speech model you can self-host

    May 2026 · kugelaudio.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10
    OpenWispr▲190

    100% local open source AI speech-to-text model

    2025 · openwhispr.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11
    LaterAI▲116

    AI-powered reading, 100% on your device

    Mar 2026 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Hi HN! Last year the project I launched here got a lot of good feedback on creating speech to speech AI on the ESP32. Recently I revamped the whole stack, iterated on that feedback and made our project fully open-source—all of the client, hardware, firmware code. This Github repo turns an ESP32-S3 into a realtime AI speech companion using the OpenAI Realtime API, Arduino WebSockets, Deno Edge Functions, and a full-stack web interface. You can talk to your own custom AI character, and it responds instantly. I couldn't find a resource that helped set up a reliable, secure websocket (WSS) AI…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13
    FreeTTS▲123

    Top TTS converter & audio editor to speed up your workflow

    2024 · freetts.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    AI-powered speech to text, tts, & translation Mac app

    Oct 2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Studio-Quality TTS in Your Browser with transformers.js!

    2025 · voiceforge.slideai.net · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Make anything an audiobook or podcast

    2025 · chromewebstore.google.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Free text to speech online

    2025 · kokoroai.org · its alternatives →

  18. 18
    Mimic 3▲77

    Privacy-focused neural text-to-speech (TTS) engine

    2022 · community.openconversational.ai · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Free Voice Typing Notebook Online with Speech Recognition

    2020 · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    For a while I've wanted to try out the new AI voices for long-form narration, but everything I found required a subscription that didn't justify my limited usage. I came across the open Kokoro model [0] and the voices are very good -- good enough to listen to for hours without the fatigue I got from legacy, robotic TTS voices. The model is 82m parameters and designed to run fast, but I still struggled to get reasonable times from CPU inference on my 12-core laptop. I thought a cloud-based GPU service would let me generate audiobooks fast enough to feed my own self-hosted library, and that…

    Jun 2026 · ebookaloud.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Your browser’s voice, now 100% offline.

    Apr 2026 · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    I built TTSLab — a free, open-source tool for running text-to-speech and speech-to-text models directly in the browser using WebGPU and WASM. No API keys, no backend, no data leaves your machine. When you open the site, you'll hear it immediately — the landing page auto-generates speech from three different sentences right in your browser, no setup required. You can then try any model yourself: type text, hit generate, hear it instantly. Models download once and get cached locally. The most experimental feature: a fully in-browser Voice Agent. It chains speech-to-text → LLM → text-to-speech,…

    Feb 2026 · ttslab.dev · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Free text to speech online with AI voices. Generate and download browser TTS audio with no signup, WAV or MP3 export, and engine-specific offline support.

    Jul 2026 · offlinetts.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Free text to speech online

    2025 · speechreader.io · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →