1,700 people downloaded my offline TTS app - turns out a lot of us don't want our reading in the cloud

I started using text-to-speech to get through articles, docs, and my own writing. Every good app had the same two problems. They cost a subscription, and they ran in the cloud. To read something aloud you had to upload it first. Your articles, your emails, your documents, all sent to someone else's servers.

That bothered me. Reading is about as private as it gets, so it felt backwards that doing it out loud should cost a recurring fee and your data. So I built the thing I actually wanted: text-to-speech that runs entirely on my own machine.

Out Loud is a desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux, plus a Chrome extension. It runs an open AI voice model fully on your device. No cloud, no account, no telemetry. Nothing you type or read ever leaves your computer. It's MIT licensed, so you don't have to trust the privacy claim, you can just read the code. There are 50+ voices across 8 languages. It's free, and there's no paid tier coming, mostly because there are no servers for me to pay for in the first place.

Here's the part I didn't expect. It's past 1,700 downloads now, and the thing people keep bringing up is the offline and private side. Not the price, not the number of voices. Just that it runs on their machine and nothing phones home. That told me something. The itch I was scratching wasn't only mine. There's a real group of people who are done trading their data and a monthly fee for basic software, and who will go out of their way to pick the local option when one actually exists.

That's the whole bet behind Out Loud, and the downloads are the first sign it might be a good one.

So why am I posting. I want to push this further, and I think this is the right crowd to ask. A lot of people here care about the same things: owning your tools, no lock-in, shipping local-first. If that pitch lands for you, the most useful thing you can do is try it and tell me two things. Do the voices sound good enough for real daily use, and what would make you switch to it for good.

You can hear the voices in your browser before installing anything: https://out-loud.io

Code is here: https://github.com/light-cloud-com/out-loud

Happy to get into how the on-device model works or why I went fully open source.