earful

Earful reads documents aloud with Kokoro, an open speech model by hexgrad, running entirely on your own computer. Nothing you open is uploaded.

What it does

• Opens PDFs, EPUB books, Word documents (.docx), saved web pages and plain text. Scanned PDFs go through text recognition first.

• Highlights each word as it is spoken. Click any sentence to start reading from there.

• Skips what you wouldn't read aloud yourself: page numbers, running headers and footers, footnotes, citation markers like [12], links and the reference list.

• Lets you jump between chapters and sections, using the headings in the file.

• Remembers where you stopped in each document.

• Plays at 0.75× to 3×. The voice is made at normal speed and sped up without raising its pitch, so a new speed takes effect straight away.

• Has 13 voices, American and British English. Kokoro's other languages need a different pronunciation engine and aren't supported yet.

• Works offline after the first visit. The page, the voice and the speech engine are all saved in your browser.

Related MCP server: Voice MCP Server

Speed

Pressing play starts the voice right away, because the first sentence is prepared as soon as a document opens. After that the voice stays ahead of playback. On a MacBook with an Apple M5 in Chrome, one second of speech takes 0.15 seconds to generate.

That speed needs WebGPU, which Chrome, Edge and Safari 26 support. Other browsers fall back to WebAssembly, which works but is slower. The first visit downloads the voice once (326 MB), and after that it is cached and works offline.

In your terminal and your coding agent

The earful command runs the same voice natively, which is faster than the browser.

earful say "The build finished."
earful read paper.pdf
earful read https://example.com/article --out article.mp3

Install it from npm:

npm install -g earful-cli

MCP server

Add Earful to Claude Code, or any other MCP client, and your agent can speak and read documents aloud on your computer:

claude mcp add earful -- earful mcp

It has four tools: speak, read_aloud, stop_reading and save_audio.

Hear when Claude Code is done

Add a Stop hook to ~/.claude/settings.json:

{
  "hooks": {
    "Stop": [{ "hooks": [{ "type": "command", "command": "earful hook" }] }]
  }
}

When Claude Code finishes, Earful says the first sentence or two of its reply, without the code and formatting.

What's next

• A desktop app with a shortcut that reads selected text in any app

• A browser extension that reads the page you're on

Run it locally

npm install
npm run dev

npm test checks the sentence splitter. npm run pdf prints what Earful would read for each PDF you put in fixtures/. The command line tool lives in cli/.

Built with

• Kokoro-82M by hexgrad (Apache-2.0), run through kokoro-js and Transformers.js on ONNX Runtime Web

• pdf.js, Readability and tesseract.js for getting the text out of files

• eSpeak NG for pronunciation

The demo video reads the abstract of Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models by Wei et al., licensed CC BY 4.0. The animation reads Pride and Prejudice from Project Gutenberg.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. Earful gets its pronunciation from eSpeak NG, which is GPL-3.0.