About Inknarrate

Inknarrate is a free text-to-speech page. You paste text, press Speak, and a natural-sounding voice reads it to you. It runs inside your browser, so your text never leaves your computer, and once it is set up it works without internet.

What it is

Inknarrate is a small web app that runs open voice models (Kitten TTS, Kokoro and Piper) directly in your browser using WebAssembly. There is no server that turns your text into audio, no account, no usage limit and no watermark. You can listen as it generates, keep every sentence, and save the result as WAV or MP3 with optional subtitles.

It starts working at once with the voice that is built into your browser. For more natural voices you add a voice model once; the app then keeps it in your browser and uses it offline.

What it can do

• Read text aloud in English, Spanish and Arabic (Spanish and Arabic through Piper voices).
• Work sentence by sentence. Every sentence is its own clip: play from any point, generate it again for a different delivery, or edit one sentence and only that one is redone.
• Import files such as .txt, .md, .epub, .docx, .srt and .html.
• Shape the sound with speed, pitch, volume, tone, pauses and pronunciation rules.
• Export WAV or MP3, subtitles (.srt, .vtt) and a zip with one file per sentence.
• Save projects as a small file with your text and settings.

Why it exists

Good text to speech should not need an account, a subscription or a big installer. The voice models behind Inknarrate are open and small enough for an ordinary computer, so a web page can do the job. Inknarrate tries to make that as simple and private as possible.

It is honest about its limits too: the choice of voices is small, and the one-time setup (downloading a model and adding it to the app) takes a few minutes. The built-in tutorial and the guide walk you through it.

Why you add the models yourself

Inknarrate does not host or ship any voice models. You download them from their authors, on Hugging Face, and add them to the app. That keeps the app small, keeps the licences of each voice with its author, and means the project never redistributes anything it is not sure it may. The guide lists where each model comes from and under which licence.

Open source

Inknarrate is free software under the GNU General Public License v3 or later. You can read the code, change it and run your own copy. The source code is here. The libraries it builds on, and their licences, are listed in NOTICE.md.

Who makes it

Inknarrate is a solo project, built and maintained by one person as a free tool. It sits next to other free apps, such as the whiteboard-animation maker Inkplainer, made the same way: free, private and running in the browser.

Contact

Questions, bug reports or ideas: you can reach the developer on Reddit, u/MisterOfHazard, or open an issue in the source repository. It is a one-person project, so replies can take a while.

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