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 – On-device neural text-to-speech queue for Mac launched on July 21, 2026 with 17 votes, #984 of 24,623 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches.
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
Select text in anywhere on your Mac, press ⌥⌘L, and Orate reads it aloud in a natural voice — queued like a podcast you work through. The text-to-speech runs 100% on your Mac: no cloud, no account, works offline. $4.99 one-time, no subscription. 14-day free trial.
On-device text-to-speech for Mac. Select any text, press ⌥⌘L, and Orate reads it aloud in a natural voice — a private listening queue for macOS & OS X. $4.99, one-time.
Select text in any app, press ⌥⌘L , and Orate reads it aloud in a natural voice, in a listening queue, entirely on your Mac. Free 14-day trial. $4.99 one-time to keep · macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon (M1 or later) You don't copy-paste, upload, or wait on a server. Orate lives in your menu bar and turns anything you're reading into something you can listen to. Select text in any app and press ⌥⌘L , or right-click and choose Add to Orate . The window title becomes the title. It lands in your listening queue and starts rendering on-device, cleaned up for the ear, with paragraphs and pauses intact. Play, pause, scrub, change speed or voice, from the menu bar or the library. It remembers where you…from orate.to
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…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
- OIOration (iOS) turns pdfs into audiobooks2024 · oration.app · ▲84
Hello HN community! I'm excited to introduce a project I've recently launched: Oration, an iOS app designed to convert PDFs into audiobooks. This idea was inspired by my experiences as an engineering student with ADHD, struggling to engage with dense academic papers. Relying on Text-to-Speech tools, despite their robotic quality, was a workaround for me and others with similar learning preferences or challenges, such as Dyslexia. Recognizing the limitations of existing tools—difficulty with complex formats, inability to skip over citations or footnotes, and inadequate handling of tables,…
Speechify Gen 0.12017 · speechify.com · ▲256Read faster, stay focused & absorb more - Create Audiobooks
More work this month
the category →
Endless lofi beats composed live in your browser, over pixel-art nights in Paris, Tokyo, New York, Hong Kong, Sydney, San Francisco and more. Free, no sign-up.
Work · 24d ago · loficities.com
Smooth Recorder▲257Mac screen recordings that look edited when you hit stop
Work · 18d ago · smoothrecorder.com
Work · 12d ago · readrare.com
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, July 2026
the whole month →- IR
I might be the only SRE on Earth with his own bowling center. It's a more in-depth gig than you'd think. My family and I bought an abandoned 8-lane bowling center in the rural mid-west. In our small town there weren't many recreation options for families. You've heard of a food desert? This is an R&R desert. It had been abandoned for a good reason. The roof leaks, the electrical system was constantly surging, and my 70-year-old bowling equipment (still) doesn't work perfectly. The system that keeps your score is particularly interesting to me. It's the thing you watch during your game, but…
Life & fun · Jul 2026
18 Words▲1,160Play 18 Words, the free daily word puzzle. The official home is 18words.com. Tap Play now to open today
Life & fun · Jul 2026 · 18words.com
- BA
Over the past few months, our team has been building more and more slidedecks using web frontend technologies with coding harnesses like Claude Code, but a common complaint is to make even small edits we need to edit the code either manually or via the harness. To avoid this loop, I ended up creating Bento, a single HTML file with everything you need in a slide tool including animations and shared editing. There's no install or cloud login, everything works offline. The default deck is around 560 KB and it doesn't need to fetch anything once you got it. Open it in a browser and then you can…
Dev tools · Jul 2026 · bento.page
A few days ago I found myself trying out GLM 5.2 and was really positively impressed. The capabilities and security I was getting from this LLM are similar to those I've gotten from models like Claude or GPT, and this really surprised me. But then I thought, "I wonder how it would work on a normal computer like mine," and above all, "I wonder if it would work without going into OOM on a computer like mine." So I started working with the help of agents to test this possibility. I started converting the model to int4, understanding MTP usage, and if possible implementing DSA for long context.…
AI · Jul 2026 · github.com
OpenSEO▲928Hello! For the last 2 months, I've been building OpenSEO. It's a user friendly UI wrapping the DataForSEO API which has high quality SEO data for keywords, backlinks, AI SEO and competitor research. Instead of paying $100+ per month, you buy DataForSEO credits and pay only for usage. The coolest thing about the project so far has been hearing about what people are building on top of it. People are using coding agents to quickly integrate with Google Search Console, Google Ads and building their own AI SEO and reporting features. Many were already building their own custom solutions around…
Dev tools · Jul 2026 · openseo.so