Rhea
Read PDFs and documents aloud, entirely on your Mac
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Rhea, currently released as HumanReadTTS, reads PDFs, Word files, EPUBs, Markdown and images aloud on your Mac. English and Chinese voices run on-device. Follow along with word highlighting, translate words and export vocabulary to Anki. Free and open source for Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 15+.
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More like this: all 63 launches in text-to-speech reading apps →
PH · launched Oct 17, 2026 · 2 upvotes (top 22%)
- Horizontal
- Content generation
- B2C
- AI-native
- Commercial product
- Productivity
- GitHub
Similar launches
See all 564 similar launches →Could you build this?
Partial The UI and basic document reading are straightforward, but running offline neural TTS and synchronizing real-time word-level audio alignments with various document parsers on Apple Silicon requires specialized engineering.
What it would actually take: Built using Swift, AppKit, PDFKit, and Apple's CoreML or MLX framework to execute on-device neural TTS models (like Kokoro or Piper). The hard technical problem is low-latency on-device model inference coupled with precise forced-alignment timestamps for word-by-word UI highlighting across EPUB, PDF, and Word docs. Requires machine learning systems expertise to quantize and optimize models for macOS hardware.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 564 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #135 of 565 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 286 days after the earliest competitor.
- Epilude Narrator · ph · 2026-10-08 · 67 upvotes · similarity 0.60
- Hearby · ph · 2026-10-29 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- Mi Speaks 2.0 · ph · 2026-10-13 · 84 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- Heard for iOS: ePub reader with on-device text to speech · hn · 2026-07-15 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- Steer · ph · 2026-11-02 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- LysnBox · ph · 2026-10-19 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Common Reader · ph · 2026-09-14 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Sandbook · ph · 2026-10-09 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.50
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.