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A Realistic, Offline & Unlimited Text-to-Speech App for Mac

RecentlyConverted said:
Quick feedback, like the large number of voice options. As a former PC user, I still use my Mac in a similar way to how I used a PC.

Please could you set your app so that two fingers click on the trackpad allows the menu to come up, so I can select paste. Old habits die hard and it would make your app easy to use for all users.
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That's super helpful feedback - I've added it to my notes for the next release!
 
MacPeasant123 said:
I would be quite interested in your app.

I teach English to high school students in China who will be going to universities abroad. Many of my students are weak with English listening, and I make extensive use of online videos, for which I get AI to create a transcript, and then blank out words to do listening practice. Finding the right accent I want, which also matches the topic and English level I want, can sometimes be very challenging if not impossible.

For my super weak students in the IFY (International Foundation Year) curriculum, I've pivoted towards British speakers/accent because their listening exam is with British speakers.

For my IBDP (International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme) students, they can have listening exams with a variety of English accents.

I have tried using Text-to-Speech on my Mac (running macOS 15.7.3 Sequoia), but the results leaves something to be desired, even with the enhanced voices.

I watched your Youtube video and the voice "Tess - British Female (GB)" sounds great for my IFY students. The voice "Zara - South African Female (ZA)" and would be useful for my IBDP students. I think it's much easier to do TTS with a voice/accent I select than the other way around, which is the way I have been doing it. I hope there are also Australian, French, and Indian accents as well for English.
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Really appreciate the effort you're putting in your teaching practice! I'd love to help here so feel free dm me for a discounted license if you don't win. And yep there are quite a few english accents available including en-au, en-in but not en-fr.
 
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badcaos said:
Hi, It's a really interesting project. i would like to participate to the giveaway. I need something like this to read what i'm writing , i'm aspiring to writing a novel, if i read what i write is hard to catch mistakes. Does the app at the moment works with italian language?
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It's english-only for now, but I’m planning to add more languages this quarter based on user feedback (the first set, in order of priority, include spanish, german, french, and italian!)
 
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The quality in those passages in the demo video is pretty amazing! The one use case I could think of using this for would be to read fiction writing passages back to me to make sure they sound normal outside of my own head 🙂
 
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@catmademedoit Sounds interesting. I'd be up for the giveaway. I sometimes use Automator's text-to speech tool to create audiobooks for personal listening. For work it might be useful to have a decent option for voiceovers for videos or podcast intros. 👍
 
Oh my god, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. I've recently been looking for a product exactly like this. Before I buy this, can I ask, is there any possibility you could build a Safari plugin which can read an article aloud? I don't like the robotic system voice and as far as I'm aware, macOS doesn't even have the ability to read articles.

Edit, I can't justify spending 100 AUD on this right now. Hopefully there'll still be some early bird discounts available next payday. I'm very interested in this, but I'd like to know if there are English and Australian accents in addition to the American voices in the trailer. I'd buy instantly if this software came with a universal hotkey to read selected text and web articles out loud.
 
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This is very impressive. I wish it was also available for the iPad Pro.

Edited to add: Purchase made.
 
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catmademedoit said:
Hey everyone 👋

Ex AI engineer turned indie maker here - excited to share something I shipped last month:

Bantr! A natural-sounding text-to-speech app that runs entirely on your Mac. I built it because almost every TTS tool these days lives in the cloud: so subscriptions, usage limits, training models with your data and... privacy leaks. Bantr is the opposite, Offline + Private + Unlimited:

  • 🤖 150+ natural, expressive voices
  • 🔒 Runs entirely on your Mac (no cloud)
  • 🆓 No login, no credit quotas
  • 💸 No subscription (one-time purchase, free future updates)
  • ⚡ Fast local generation leveraging Apple's MLX framework
My first users were students, educators, ADHD minds, dyslexic readers, privacy-first folks, and more - their feedback shaped Bantr. Now I’m broadening the use cases, so I’m hosting a small giveaway.

Le Giveaway:
I’m giving away 100% off codes to 20 people! Just comment your use case to participate and I’ll generate and publish a randomized list of winners by the end of next week.


P.S. Social workers, students, and creators (w/ reach) get special deals - just shoot me a dm!
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I'd use it for languages other than English for videos to be appropriate in other countries.
 
ignatius345 said:
The quality in those passages in the demo video is pretty amazing! The one use case I could think of using this for would be to read fiction writing passages back to me to make sure they sound normal outside of my own head 🙂
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Appreciate it! and yeah I'm working on increasing the word limits (indefinitely) and adding support for uploading epubs - both of which would improve the UX for your use case!
 
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Mr.Ben said:
@catmademedoit Sounds interesting. I'd be up for the giveaway. I sometimes use Automator's text-to speech tool to create audiobooks for personal listening. For work it might be useful to have a decent option for voiceovers for videos or podcast intros. 👍
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That use case has been brought up a few times so I'm planning to roll out support for directly ingesting pdfs and epubs, along with higher word limits (potentially indefinite).
 
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Rradcircless said:
Oh my god, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. I've recently been looking for a product exactly like this. Before I buy this, can I ask, is there any possibility you could build a Safari plugin which can read an article aloud? I don't like the robotic system voice and as far as I'm aware, macOS doesn't even have the ability to read articles.

Edit, I can't justify spending 100 AUD on this right now. Hopefully there'll still be some early bird discounts available next payday. I'm very interested in this, but I'd like to know if there are English and Australian accents in addition to the American voices in the trailer. I'd buy instantly if this software came with a universal hotkey to read selected text and web articles out loud.
Click to expand...
Glad to hear that! and yes - a few other users have mentioned this use case so I'm evaluating ways to improve the UX such that won't need to copy paste content. A couple ideas were to maybe have a global right click context menu item wherever you highlight text, or a smart companion browser extension (I was thinking chrome and edge, but can easily include safari too!) that reads core page content on click. And yes there are a few few australian and many English (GB) accents.

Feel free to dm me anytime for questions 🙂
 
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Apple_Robert said:
This is very impressive. I wish it was also available for the iPad Pro.

Edited to add: Purchase made.
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Ayy that's super cool of you! appreciate it : ) and yep I do intend to work on a lightweight model that runs on other devices later this year (once I perfect this)!

P.S. feel free to dm/email me any time for questions/feedback!
 
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BradMacPro said:
I'd use it for languages other than English for videos to be appropriate in other countries.
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Interesting - it's en only atm but the next set of languages (prioritized by feedback) I'm working on this quarter include es, de, fr and it!

Sidenote - I think youtube also has an interesting feature (autodub) in the works for this.
 
I'd be very interesting in giving this a deep dive. I'm an academic researcher and read and write a lot of technical texts and student texts. Though I'm an accomplished writer, I'm an extremely slow reader and good text to speech is a useful tool for me.
 
headlessmike said:
I'd be very interesting in giving this a deep dive. I'm an academic researcher and read and write a lot of technical texts and student texts. Though I'm an accomplished writer, I'm an extremely slow reader and good text to speech is a useful tool for me.
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Thanks for sharing - happy to help with a academic discount even if you don't win (announcing tomorrow*).
 
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Thanks to everyone who participated! Here are the names math.random() blessed today:

Code: 
theHaxxor, p33t3r, badcaos, Mr.Ben, ignatius345, RecentlyConverted, Macintosh101, gregmac19, BradMacPro, Rradcircless, MacPeasant123, chabig, TheScribbler, jyhem, 87arc

If you're on the list, please DM me to get your free license code 🙂

Not on the list? If you commented here then DM me for a discounted license!
 
I’m a middle school teacher who teaches mostly Ukrainian students. This would be awesome to use on our readings if you happen to have a teacher discount 🙂
 
Just watched the Youtube video. Impressive!

I dont think I have a use case, but just seeing how well it works, the standalone licensing and 'offline' functionality makes me want to buy it anyway!

I have two curiosities:

One, the voice themselves, really interested to know how they came about or the source/training required for them! Is it all procedurally generated, or are they built up from voice samplea from friends or other real humans? I'm somewhat of a layman with regard to how this is done! Any insight in this would be cool!

Secondly, (as an attempt to create a use case for myself) is there some way to integrate this software such that I could take this audio on the go?

I'm imagining something like feeding it some links of articles, or emails, or discussion posts (hackerne.ws, reddit), I want to 'read' and having it parse and perform the TTS, encode to mp3 (or whatever) and upload to icloud such that with a native interface on my iPhone I could find a folder structure of the articles/links I supplied and find my recordings on the go...

Seems like a huge 'feature request' but I see this as a big one, something a lot of folks who want to keep up with news/discussion/emails, but dont want their eyes buried in their phones while out and about!

I think something like this would sell like crazy if it was well integrated and easy to use. Perhaps a phone app that would allow you to send your computer at home the links/text/epubs whatever and later all are available in icloud. Maybe this could even be done without an app! Maybe just a special Notes entry in icloud that the Mac back home scans for and takes links from to queue up!

Just a (big) idea! 🙂
Take my money!
 
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