Guides
Speakybara is a free app for Windows and Mac that turns any part of your screen into text you can copy or listen to: press a hotkey, drag a frame, done. These guides cover the handful of things that are worth reading once.
Each one is a real sequence of steps, checked against the app. Nothing here needs an account. Only the guides with a key of your own can cost money, and then the service behind that key bills you, not us. The steps follow the Windows version and say where the Mac differs; for the Mac, the download page has its own three steps to get started.
Getting started
Install it, then make the hotkeys yours.
AI actions
Built-in actions like Explain and Summarize, your own actions, and the model that powers them.
- Connect your own AITwo ways in: paste a key from OpenAI, Google Gemini or OpenRouter, or point Speakybara at a model you already run yourself with Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp or Unsloth/vLLM.
- Quick actions, and writing your ownFive actions are built in — Translate, Explain with AI, Improve writing, Summarize and Step-by-step plan — and you can write up to eight of your own, each just a name, an instruction and an icon.
Voices
Local voices that work offline, better pronunciation, and Google's best voices with your own key.
- Offline voices with PiperThe local voice is the one that works on a train, on a locked-down laptop and with nothing leaving your PC at all.
- Add your own English wordsDutch text at work is full of English terms. This is how you stop a local voice from mangling the ones it does not know.
- Set up your own Google Cloud API keyGoogle's best voices, on your own account, at Google's prices. Expect about 15 minutes of clicking around in a console you may never have opened before.
Complete
The subscription, called Compleet in the app: where it stands, and what works in the meantime.
Not in here?
The FAQ answers the short questions. For anything else, one person reads every message.