I wanted to listen to articles without a robotic voice or another subscription, so I built Chickadee: a free, open-source Chrome extension that runs a voice model locally.

It runs Kokoro-82M, an 82-million-parameter speech model, directly in your browser using WebGPU. The speech is generated on your computer. No account, API key, or subscription needed.

Chickadee includes:

• 12 voices and adjustable playback speed

• Sentence highlighting right on the original page

• Offline speech after the initial model download

• No account, subscription, or API key

Source: https://github.com/sahilmahendrakar/chickadee

I'd love to hear what you think. Try it out here https://www.usechickadee.com