Hearald — Read Aloud for Pages & PDFs

Read web pages, PDFs and Google Docs aloud with natural voices on your device. Word-by-word highlighting. Free, private, offline.

Hearald reads web pages, PDFs, Google Docs and Google Slides out loud in a natural voice, and highlights each word as it is spoken. The voice runs on your own computer. Nothing you read is uploaded, there is no account to create, and once the voice has downloaded, Hearald works with no internet connection at all. Installing Hearald asks for no access to your websites: it reads a page only when you ask it to. WHAT IT DOES - Reads any web page aloud — articles, documentation, course material, long email threads. Click the Hearald icon or press Alt+R. - Reads PDFs aloud too. Open a PDF in Chrome and press play. - Reads Google Docs and Google Slides. Open the document and press play; Hearald reads it in its own view with the same highlighting. - 28 natural voices, US and UK. Hear a sample in your own words before you pick one. - Word-by-word highlighting — the sentence lights up and the spoken word stands out, so listening and reading reinforce each other. - Start from any paragraph. Hover the part you care about and press play right there. - Skips forward and back a sentence at a time, not ten seconds at a time, so you never land in the middle of a definition. - Speed from 0.75x to 2x, changing the moment you tap. - Remembers where you stopped on every page and picks up there. - Finds the actual article and skips menus, sidebars and footers — or right-click exactly the part you want read. - Works in learning platforms such as Canvas, including course pages and quizzes. PRIVATE BY DESIGN Hearald has no account and no server. The pages you read, the words you hear and how fast you listen all stay on your machine. That is not a setting you switch on; it is how it is built. Hearald asks for no site permissions when you install it. It reads the page you are on only after you click its icon, press Alt+R, or choose it from the right-click menu. If you prefer the play button on every page before you click, there is a setting for that, and Chrome asks you before turning it on. WORKS OFFLINE The voice downloads once. After that Hearald reads with no connection at all — on a plane, in a dead zone, anywhere. WHO IT IS FOR Students working through coursework. Anyone facing long articles or documentation. People who take things in better by ear. Anyone who wants to rest their eyes and keep reading. A NOTE ON SIZE Hearald includes a complete neural voice so it can run without sending your reading to a server. That makes the download large. It is the same reason the voices cost nothing and the reading stays private. HEARALD PRO — OPTIONAL, ONE-TIME Everything above is free and stays free, including PDFs. Hearald Pro is for people getting through a lot of reading rather than one page at a time: a reading list you can queue pages and PDFs into, Play All to work through the whole list hands-off, focus sessions built around reading, daily goals, and a record of everything you have finished. $29 once — not a subscription, and still no account to create.