Audience
Mac users, including students, researchers, writers, and people with dyslexia or eye strain, who want to listen to text, PDFs, screenshots, and web articles.
About Aloud
Aloud is a native macOS text-to-speech app for listening to selected text, PDFs, screenshots, images, and web articles. It reads selections from other Mac apps, can skip PDF headers, footers, and page numbers, recognize scanned pages and image text on-device, and highlight words as they are spoken. Users can control playback in a small floating reader, resume recent readings, adjust speed, set pronunciations, and export audio as M4A. Voices include those installed on macOS and the optional Kokoro neural voice, which runs locally on supported Macs. Users may also connect their own ElevenLabs or Cartesia API key for cloud voices, with those providers billing usage separately. Aloud is designed for Mac users who want to listen while working with documents, research, writing, or web content. It requires macOS 14 or later and is sold as a one-time purchase.