Your Mac, read aloud.
zRead lives in the menu bar. Highlight text, press Option–Escape, and listen while you keep working. Start with Mac Voice or connect your own ElevenLabs or Grok Voice account.
- Free
- 2.6 MB
- Apple silicon
- macOS 26 or later
Field notes
Select a few words, then press ⌥ Esc or Listen.
Somewhere in the middle of a long article, you highlight a paragraph. The window stays where it is. A voice you picked yourself starts reading, and the rest of the page waits until you come back to it.
This silent website demo illustrates reading pace. zRead reads your selection aloud without highlighting spoken words.
Made for the apps you read in
- Safari
- Chrome
- Notes
- Notion
- Preview
- Slack
- Pages
- and more
How it works
Three moves. One shortcut.
Nothing to open, paste, or upload. zRead reads what is already on your screen.
- 01
Select
Highlight a sentence, a paragraph, or a page in an app that exposes selected text.
- 02Option Escape
Press
Option–Escape. Change it to anything you like in Settings.
- 03
Listen
Your voice starts within a moment. Press the shortcut again to stop.
Speed, on the fly
Choose 1×, 1.25×, 1.5×, 2×, 2.5×, or 3×. Cloud voices change speed immediately from the reading controls while keeping pitch natural. Mac Voice applies changes to the next read.
With a cloud voice, speed changes while it reads and pitch stays natural. Mac Voice uses the new speed on your next read. Pause, resume, or stop from the menu bar, or press the shortcut again.
Words move at 1×. The pitch would not change.
Voices
Your voices. Not ours.
Start with your Mac’s system voice, without an account. Connect ElevenLabs or Grok Voice when you’re ready to choose from your account’s voices.
Your whole library
Saved, cloned, and designed voices are all listed. Pick one and it becomes the voice of your Mac.
Frontier-quality speech
ElevenLabs brings natural, expressive delivery to the voices in your account, powered by its newest model, Eleven v4. Mac Voice remains available whenever you prefer local reading.
Consistent, page after page
Your choice carries across every app and every session, so a document sounds the same tonight as it did this morning.
- Illustrative voice row
- Illustrative voice row
- Illustrative voice row
- Illustrative voice row
- Illustrative voice row
- Illustrative voice row
- Illustrative voice row
Illustration only. This website does not connect to your account. In the app, connect ElevenLabs to browse the voices available to you.
Built for macOS
Lives in the menu bar. Stays out of the way.
zRead waits in the menu bar and shows a compact playback pill while it reads. Drag its grip to any screen edge: vertical at the left or right, horizontal at the top or bottom. Keep a Dock icon too, if you prefer.
The chip keeps pause, speed, and stop close by. In the app, drag its three-dot grip to move it.
Choose a position to preview the chip. No audio plays.
- download size
- 2.6 MB
- windows to arrange
- 0
- shortcut to learn
- 1
- on Apple silicon
- Native
Fast to start
Native on Apple silicon, with no browser in the loop. Press the shortcut and audio starts while the app you were reading in stays in front.
Quiet by design
One mark in the menu bar and a compact playback pill. No notifications, no badges, nothing asking for attention.
Yours to configure
Command–Comma opens Settings for the shortcut, the voice, playback speed and volume, privacy, and software updates.
Privacy
Your voice source. Your choice.
Mac Voice reads locally. With ElevenLabs or Grok Voice selected, text goes directly to that account when you start or explicitly resume a read. zRead saves no transcripts or audio files.
Step 1
You select
A sentence or a page in a supported app.
Step 2
You press
Option–Escape, or your own shortcut.
Step 3
Your voice speaks
On your Mac, or through ElevenLabs or Grok Voice.
Step 4
No saved transcript
Interrupted text stays in memory until dismissed.
Key in the Keychain
Paste your ElevenLabs or xAI key once. macOS stores each in the Keychain and the fields stay masked.
On demand only
Cloud narration starts only when you request a read or resume. Account refreshes and optional update checks never send your selected text.
Memory only
No saved transcript or audio. An interrupted selection stays in memory for recovery; dismiss it, start a new read, or quit to discard it.
Local from the start
Choose Mac Voice to read on this Mac without an ElevenLabs account or narration credits.
- No browser tab to keep open
- No file to upload to someone else’s reader
- No paste into a second window
- No account with us
Developer ID signed · Notarized
2.6 MB · SHA-256 1e52def3acba1426…
What’s new
A new voice joins.
Grok Voice (xAI) is now a narration source next to ElevenLabs and Mac Voice. Connect once with your own API key — it stays in this Mac's Keychain — and keep both cloud accounts saved.
Connect Grok Voice
Paste an xai- API key from console.x.ai once in Settings → Voice. zRead verifies it by loading your account's voices, stores it only in the Keychain under its own entry, and keeps your ElevenLabs key untouched.
Your xAI voices, your choice
Pick from the voices on your xAI account — Eve by default — or enter a cloned voice ID from the xAI console. Built-in voices are listed even before you connect, and each provider remembers its own voice.
Same reading experience
Speed presets, voice volume, media pausing, checkpoints, interrupted-read recovery, and the optional Mac Voice fallback work exactly as with ElevenLabs. One language is detected per read so accents never flip mid-passage.
Errors name the service
Setup offers Mac Voice, ElevenLabs, and Grok Voice. If a key or voice needs attention, zRead says which service — and a key pasted into the wrong provider's field is rejected before anything is sent.
Download
Give your Mac a voice.
Free download. Signed with Developer ID and notarized by Apple. Start locally with Mac Voice, or bring your ElevenLabs or xAI API key. No account with us, ever.
Download zRead 1.18.0Designed for Apple devices · DMG · Apple silicon
- Version
- 1.18.0 (45)
- Size
- 2.6 MB
- Requires
- macOS 26 or later · Apple silicon
- SHA-256
- 1e52def3acba1426ea9e28df36b8bdd0950a1b62529834be693097e913eb5c6b
From download to listening
- 1
Open the disk image and drag zRead into Applications.
- 2
Launch zRead and grant Accessibility and Input Monitoring, so it can read your selection and hear the shortcut.
- 3
Choose Mac Voice or connect ElevenLabs or Grok Voice, allow the reading permissions, and press Option–Escape on a sentence. Practice is optional.
Mac Voice needs no API key and reads locally. For cloud voices, your ElevenLabs and xAI keys stay in the Keychain and are used only for account requests and reads you start.
To uninstall, quit zRead, move it from Applications to the Trash, then remove it from System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility and Input Monitoring.
Updating zRead
How do I get the latest version?
Open zRead’s menu and choose Check for Updates, then install and relaunch. You can also download the latest disk image here, quit zRead, and replace the app in Applications.
Can I still use Check for Updates?
Yes. Open zRead’s menu and choose Check for Updates, or open Settings → Updates. The in-app updater and this website offer the same latest release. Versions 1.5.0 and earlier need a manual disk-image update.
How do I pause Chrome videos while zRead reads?
Browser pausing is optional and off by default. In General Settings, turn on Pause other media while reading, select Chrome videos, and choose Prepare Chrome connection. Use Copy companion extension folder, open chrome://extensions, enable developer mode, and load that folder as an unpacked extension. Open the companion’s options and approve each video website, then check that zRead shows Chrome connected. Ordinary YouTube videos and other supported website videos can then pause during narration; Safari, live streams, calls, and browser audio that does not use the standard media player remain outside this feature.
What if the reading shortcut stops working after an update?
Check zRead’s General Settings for Accessibility and Input Monitoring readiness. If a grant is stale, open that pane in System Settings → Privacy & Security and re-enable zRead for the copy in Applications, then reopen the app. Keep your saved key and preferences.