Launching today
Orate.to
Read-it-later, for your ears — 100% on-device
16 followers
Read-it-later, for your ears — 100% on-device
16 followers
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.
Soothe
love the offline approach and the queue idea, feels way more useful than the typical tts apps. one thing though — would be great to have a way to save the queue as a playlist file, so you can pick up where you left off the next day without re-adding everything manually. right now i'm not sure how that works after restarting.
Soothe
@damlab78c great idea! I’m hopping on a flight but will have that added by tomorrow!
Soothe
@damlab78c Everything persists between restarts so you should be okay... I'll add the export feature now to move between macs. Also planning to release a mobile app so you can "send to phone" to listen as well
Highlighted a long article, hit the shortcut, and it actually kept reading while I switched windows to take notes. The on-device voice is way better than I expected for the price.
Soothe
@erhan1053777 Glad to hear it... If you run into any issues, let me know! I'm working on adding a feature to de-clutter web text and verbally annotate images (explain what the image is and show in a popup in the right corner when we get to that point in the text)
love that it runs entirely on-device, no cloud round-trip just to read a sentence out loud. the queueing it like a podcast thing is a nice touch too, basically treats TTS like a real listening session instead of a one-off utility. solid execution.
the choice to queue selections like a podcast queue is genuinely clever, makes it feel less like a utility and more like a workflow you'd actually want to settle into
Soothe
@salih416617 That's what you get when you build the product you want! I built it just the way I wanted it to integrate into my workflow and honestly, it's been pretty great. There's still a ways to go for AI voice models, but they're getting good enough.
Love that the whole thing runs locally and queues up like a podcast you can chip away at. The shortcut-first design feels right at home on macOS too.
Soothe
@emirsedefc29601 I built it to be intuitive and easy to use and luckily with Apple Silicon and advanced AI models I was able to keep it fully offline. I've loved using it the last few weeks and I think others will too!
love that the queueing feels like a podcast queue instead of just a plain text-to-speech dump. and keeping it fully on-device for the price of a coffee is a really nice touch.
Soothe
@elisisefa40769 I am burnt out on getting chipped away for $2-10/mo on EVERYTHING. My plan is to build useful utilities for a price so low you can't afford not to try it.