Listen to anything.
On your own machine.

A free, open-source Chrome extension that reads articles & PDFs aloud in a natural AI voice — running 100% locally. No account, no subscription, no data leaving your computer.

Get Spiel — it's free ★ Star on GitHub

● $0 forever● Private by design● Works offline● Open source

Get started

Two things. About three minutes.

No coding. The voice runs on your Mac, so setup is a one-time install — then it just works, even without Wi-Fi.

Add Spiel to Chrome

One click from the Chrome Web Store — no developer mode, no zip files.

Add to Chrome — free

Then pin the Spiel icon to your toolbar. Prefer to install manually? Guide →

Install the voice

Paste this one line into the Terminal app and press Enter. It sets up the local AI voice.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/preet01/spiel/main/install.sh | bash

~2 minutes. When your Mac says “Spiel is ready” out loud, you're done.

Press Play

Open any article or PDF, click the Spiel icon, and hit Play. Words highlight as it reads — click anywhere to jump.

Requires an Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer). Intel & Windows are on the roadmap.

Why Spiel

Speechify quality, without the catch.

Everything you'd pay $139/year for — free, open, and private.

Natural neural voice

The open Kokoro-82M model — warm and human, not robotic. Four voices, up to 3× speed.

Follow-along highlighting

Each word lights up as it's spoken, and the page scrolls itself so you never lose your place.

Reads PDFs too

Research papers and documents — extracted locally with pdf.js, read aloud sentence by sentence.

100% local & private

The voice runs at 127.0.0.1 on your machine. No accounts, no telemetry, nothing uploaded. Ever.

Selection & click-to-read

Highlight any text for instant playback, or click a paragraph to start reading from there.

Dark mode & free forever

Matches every page, light or dark. Open-source under MIT — no paywall, no trial, no upsell.

Privacy

Nothing you read ever leaves your computer.

Most read-aloud tools stream your reading history through their servers. Spiel doesn't have servers. The voice engine listens only on 127.0.0.1 — your own machine, unreachable from the network.

The only time Spiel touches the internet is the one-time download of the voice model at install.

┌──────────── Your Mac ────────────┐ │ │ │ Chrome Voice engine │ │ ┌──────────┐ text ┌──────────┐ │ │ │ Spiel │ ───▶ │ Kokoro │ │ │ │extension │ ◀─── │ 127.0.0.1│ │ │ └──────────┘audio └──────────┘ │ │ │ └──── nothing crosses this line ────┘

Questions

Good to know

Is it really free?

Yes — completely. Spiel is open-source (MIT) and there's no account, trial, or paid tier. It's built as a free alternative to subscription read-aloud apps, especially for students and researchers.

Do I need to know how to code?

No. The extension itself is a one-click install from the Chrome Web Store. There's one more step after that: copy one line into the Terminal app (we give you the exact line and a Copy button) and press Enter — that installs the local voice engine, which is what actually makes Spiel talk. No coding involved, just paste and wait ~2 minutes.

Is my data private?

Completely. The AI voice runs entirely on your computer at 127.0.0.1. No text, reading history, or audio is ever sent anywhere. Turn off Wi-Fi and it still works.

What computers does it work on?

Today: Apple Silicon Macs (M1 or newer) with Chrome. Intel Macs and Windows/Linux are on the roadmap — star the repo to follow along.

Can it read PDFs and research papers?

Yes. Spiel extracts the text locally with pdf.js and reads it aloud with the same word-by-word follow-along, for web-hosted and local PDFs alike.

Listen to anything.On your own machine.