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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.
Hey Product Hunt. I'm Brad — you may know me from Soothe.com, Jeevz.com, or tryrelease.com... I'm a maker based in Lake Tahoe.
Orate is "read-it-later, for your ears." You select text anywhere on your Mac — an article, an email, a PDF, docs you don't feel like reading — hit ⌥⌘L, and it reads it aloud in a natural voice, queued up like a playlist. Play, pause, skip, change the speed.
The thing I actually built it for: **the text-to-speech is 100% on-device.** It's a local neural model running on your Mac. Nothing gets uploaded, there's no account, and it works with the wifi off. There's an optional HD voice tier that downloads a heavier model for even more natural speech — still runs locally.
On price: I got tired of the subscription-for-everything thing, so it's **$4.99, one-time.** You own it, includes minor updates, no recurring bill. 14-day trial, no card to start. macOS 14+, notarized direct download, auto-updates itself.
One use case that turned out to matter more than I expected — accessibility. Listening instead of reading genuinely helps with dyslexia, low vision, eye strain, and focus, and it's just good for multitasking.
I built this because I wanted it and it didn't exist. Would love your feedback, and I'll be here in the comments all day.
Site: https://orate.to · Download / trial: https://orate.to/download
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.
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.
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.
Love that the shortcut is built around ⌥⌘L—feels intuitive and consistent with macOS conventions. And keeping everything on-device with a one-time price instead of yet another subscription is a refreshing call.
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
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.
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.
About Orate.to on Product Hunt
“Read-it-later, for your ears — 100% on-device”
Orate.to was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 12 upvotes and 15 comments, placing #55 on the daily leaderboard. 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.
Orate.to was featured in Mac (103.6k followers), Productivity (656.6k followers) and Menu Bar Apps (12.2k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 159.2k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Orate.to?
Orate.to was hunted by bradherman. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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