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.…
In plain words
Orate is a Mac application that converts selected text into audio using on-device text-to-speech technology. Users highlight text from emails, articles, or web pages and add it to a listening queue via keyboard shortcut, which processes and plays back the content with natural-sounding voices. The tool operates entirely offline and locally, includes features like playback speed adjustment, tagging, and system controls, with an optional premium tier for higher-quality voices. It's designed for people managing large amounts of unread content.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
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!
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