About Parrot

I built Parrot because I tried some of the existing text-to-speech apps but none were open source and extensible. So Parrot was made to fill this gap.

It’s probably the most simple text to speech app, it’s only function is to read aloud anything you select. Press and hold a keyboard shortcut, and hear it read aloud. It runs completely offline using Kokoro-82M, works across platforms, and doesn’t require subscriptions or cloud services.

Parrot is a fork of Handy by CJ Pais, released under the MIT License. The original project provided the Tauri architecture, audio pipeline, and UI foundation that made Parrot possible, including this website.

Project Goals

Parrot isn’t trying to be the best text-to-speech app. It’s trying to be the most forkable one.

Parrot is a starting point for when you need accessibility features, want to experiment with voice computing, or just prefer tools you can actually own and modify. The project is designed to be tiny and extensible. It is opinionated and you might have feature requests that may not make it into the main project, but you are more than welcome to implement them yourself. And with the help of Claude Code and agentic programming tools, you might just be able to without any programming experience.

Take it, fork it, modify it, break it, fix it. Build something amazing and share it to everyone.

Under the Hood

  • Press a shortcut to read selected text aloud
  • Reads your text using the Kokoro-82M model
  • Runs entirely on your machine with GPU acceleration when available
  • Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux

That’s it.

Lend a Hand

Want to fix some of these issues? Come lend a hand!

I’m actively looking for contributors who want to help make this codebase cleaner, more robust, and more accessible. I hope that Parrot can be the simplest starter codebase for someone wanting to play around with a desktop text to speech application. There is so much possibility in voice computing interfaces that just need someone with some imagination to make real.

If you love Rust and see places where the code can be better please submit PR’s. I would love to learn from you, and we all can learn from a well-patterned simple codebase. Let’s make Parrot that codebase together.

The goal is to build something that serves as both a useful tool and a foundation for others to build upon. A place where the community can come together to create something better than any one person could build alone.

Get Started

Download it, try it, read the code. See if it works for what you need.

Your search for the right text-to-speech tool can end here—not because Parrot is perfect, but because you can make it perfect for you.