Listen to a web article or research PDF read aloud instead of reading it yourself.
Have text read on a Mac with no internet connection once the voice engine is installed.
Select a specific passage on any page and hear just that part read back.
| preet01/spiel | 4ssh1/mine-sweeper | achawla19/intuitcode-extension | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Language | TypeScript | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| Last pushed | — | 2026-01-31 | — |
| Maintenance | — | Maintained | — |
| Setup difficulty | moderate | moderate | moderate |
| Complexity | 2/5 | 2/5 | 4/5 |
| Audience | general | vibe coder | developer |
Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.
Requires a Mac with Apple Silicon and running a one-time Terminal install script for the voice engine.
Spiel is a Chrome extension that reads articles and PDFs out loud using a natural sounding AI voice, and it does all of this entirely on your own Mac. There is no account to create, no subscription fee, and no data sent to a company's servers. It is built as a free alternative to paid read aloud services like Speechify, and it keeps working even with Wi-Fi turned off, since the voice engine never leaves your computer. The extension lets you open any article or PDF and press play, then follows along with word by word highlighting as it reads. You can click anywhere in the text to jump the reading to that spot, or select a specific passage to hear just that part. There are four voice options covering American and British accents in male and female versions, playback speed up to three times normal, and a running estimate of how much time is left at your chosen speed. It also has a dark mode that matches whatever page you are reading, and it can be told to skip over things like web links or bracketed references. Getting it running takes two steps. First you add the extension from the Chrome Web Store, or install it manually from a downloaded file if you prefer. Second, you run a short installer command in your Mac's Terminal app, which sets up a separate voice engine called Kokoro that generates the actual speech. This installer downloads the necessary files, sets the voice engine to start automatically whenever your Mac starts up, and confirms everything works by having your Mac say a test sentence out loud. Behind the scenes, the extension pulls the readable text out of a page or PDF on your own device, sends it to the local voice engine running only on your machine at a private local address, and plays back the resulting audio with highlighting timed to match the words being spoken. Because the voice engine only listens on your own machine, and because no analytics are collected, the only time Spiel connects to the internet at all is during that one time installation of the voice engine files. Right now Spiel only supports Macs with Apple Silicon chips, though support for Intel Macs, Windows, and Linux is planned. The project is released under the MIT license and built using several other open source components credited in its documentation.
Spiel is a Chrome extension that reads articles and PDFs aloud using a local AI voice engine on your Mac, with no accounts or cloud servers involved.
Mainly TypeScript. The stack also includes TypeScript, Chrome Extension, Kokoro.
MIT license: free to use, modify, and distribute, including commercially, as long as the copyright notice is kept.
Setup difficulty is rated moderate, with roughly 5min to a first successful run.
Mainly general.
This repo across BitVibe Labs
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