Your Mac, read aloud.
zRead lives in the menu bar. Highlight any text, press Option–Escape, and an ElevenLabs voice from your own account reads it back while you keep working.
- Free
- 2.8 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.
Nothing plays on this page. The highlight shows how a voice would move through the words.
Works wherever you can select text
- 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 the whole page in any app.
- 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
1×, 1.25×, 1.5×, or 2×. Change it mid-sentence and the pitch stays put. Pause, resume, or stop from the menu bar.
Speed changes while it reads. The pitch stays where you left it. 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.
zRead ships without a single voice. Paste your ElevenLabs API key and every voice in your account appears, including the ones you cloned or designed yourself.
Your whole library
Saved, cloned, and designed voices are all listed. Pick one and it becomes the voice of your Mac.
Frontier-quality speech
Breath, pauses, and phrasing come from the ElevenLabs model your account already uses. Paragraphs sound spoken, not pronounced.
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.
- A voice in your account, name hidden
- A voice in your account, name hidden
- A voice in your account, name hidden
- A voice in your account, name hidden
- A voice in your account, name hidden
- A voice in your account, name hidden
- A voice in your account, name hidden
Read live from your ElevenLabs account. zRead never copies or stores this list.
Built for macOS
Lives in the menu bar. Stays out of the way.
No dock icon, no window to manage, no tab to keep open. zRead waits behind a single menu-bar mark and shows a small heads-up display while it reads.
One mark in the menu bar. No dock icon, no window, nothing running in the background.
- on disk
- 2.8 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 small heads-up display. No notifications, no badges, nothing asking for attention.
Yours to configure
Command–Comma opens Settings for the shortcut, the voice, playback speed, privacy, and software updates.
Privacy
Your text goes one place, once.
zRead sends the words you selected to ElevenLabs, with your key, at the moment you press the shortcut. Nothing is logged, nothing is stored, and nothing happens in the background.
Step 1
You select
A sentence or a page, in any app.
Step 2
You press
Option–Escape, or your own shortcut.
Step 3
ElevenLabs speaks
Using your account and your voice.
Step 4
Nothing stays
No history, transcript, or audio file.
Key in the Keychain
Paste your ElevenLabs key once. macOS stores it in the Keychain and the field stays masked.
On demand only
Text leaves your Mac only when you press the shortcut. zRead makes no requests while it waits.
Nothing kept
No reading history, no transcripts, no saved audio. When playback ends, the text is gone.
Local fallback
Prefer to stay offline? The optional Mac system voice reads entirely on your Mac.
- 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
2.8 MB · SHA-256 b3aa9d964bfcd0aa…
What’s new
Your highlight, even in native custom views.
zRead can now read the text you highlight in Telegram and other native apps whose content uses custom macOS views.
Native custom views
Highlighted message text in Telegram and similar native content can now reach the same reading flow as ordinary text fields.
The highlight, not the bubble
zRead never substitutes an entire Accessibility label when it cannot verify the exact selected text.
Clipboard ownership
Copy is used only for classified non-secure native content, then your clipboard is restored unless something newer replaced it.
Uncertain stays blocked
Passwords, unknown protection metadata, and unresolved Chrome selections remain fail-closed.
Download
Give your Mac a voice.
Free download. Signed with Developer ID and notarized by Apple. Bring your own ElevenLabs API key. No account with us, ever.
Download zRead 1.6.2Designed for Apple devices · DMG · Apple silicon
- Version
- 1.6.2 (23)
- Size
- 2.8 MB
- Requires
- macOS 26 or later · Apple silicon
- SHA-256
- b3aa9d964bfcd0aafd84724a0f2114a0e302c45444a6f465b51f36cdd1ee3ed8
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
Paste your ElevenLabs API key, pick a voice, and press Option–Escape on any sentence.
zRead needs an ElevenLabs API key from your own account. It stays in the Keychain and leaves your Mac only in the requests 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.