I hit play. The voice that came out of my AirPods was good. Big-tech good. Not a chatbot, not a cloud service, not a subscription I was burning through. Just Kokoro, running on the Mac sitting on my desk. I wasn't running a server. I wasn't running a super-computer. In 2026 it finally just is what it was always supposed to be — yours, on your own machine, no monthly bill, no API key, no permission asked. So I got up, put the AirPods in, and went outside.
Get up and walk around. You're now free from your desk.
Stop paying for TTS.
Paste any text — an article, an email draft, a chapter you're editing, a Slack thread. ReadPep doesn't care what it is and it never leaves your Mac.
Fifty-plus Kokoro voices. American, British, male, female, expressive, flat. Preview each one in real time. Find the voice that sounds like the one in your head.
Hit play. Watch the teleprompter reveal each chunk in big Baskerville. AirPlay it to your AirPods, your kitchen HomePod, the Bluetooth speaker on the dock. Save the audio as MP3 or M4A when you're done.
American and British. Male and female. Warm narrators, measured, dry, gravelly, expressive, flat. Preview each one inside ReadPep before you commit. Sample players land on this page Tuesday July 1, once we render the audio clean.
A few of the names you'll find: Michael (American · warm), George (British · narrator), Emma (British · measured), Bella (American · expressive), Lewis (British · dry), Daniel (British · gravelly), Sky (American · bright). All 54 are bundled — no downloads after install.
Paste any text up to a chapter long. Pick a voice. Hit play. Speed slider. Save the rendered audio as MP3 or M4A — your choice, both first-class. The whole thing is one Cmd-V.
Watch the text reveal chunk-by-chunk in big Baskerville while it plays. Stay at the desk and proof-read along, or look away and let it follow you around the house.
Apple's own AirPlay button right in the player. AirPods on the walk. Bluetooth speaker over the dishes. HomePod in the kitchen. The whole house listens, you walk past every speaker.
After the first download, ReadPep works on a plane, in a basement, in a cabin in Lake City. Kokoro lives on your Mac. So does every byte of audio. No API call, no cloud round-trip, no monthly bill — ever.
Flip a switch in Super Nerd mode (or pass --emit-json) and ReadPep writes one JSON object per segment as it plays: chunk id, text, start/end ms, voice. Pipe it into a second screen, your iPad, a Shortcut, anything that reads stdin.
File menu → Uninstall ReadPep. A modal lists every file we wrote — model cache, config, voice samples. You hit Remove Everything. We leave your Mac the way we found it.
Use the GUI like a normal person. Or pipe ReadPep's chunk stream into anything that reads stdin — second-screen teleprompter, smart-home cue, your own script. One JSON object per segment as it plays.
readpep --emit-json playback.jsonl ~/Documents/article.txt &
tail -f playback.jsonl
# {"v":1,"chunk_id":"…","segment_index":0,"text":"Two months in this chair.","start_ms":0,"end_ms":1340,"voice":"bm_george"}
# {"v":1,"chunk_id":"…","segment_index":1,"text":"Brand new Mac, terrible angle.","start_ms":1340,"end_ms":2780,"voice":"bm_george"}
# {"v":1,"event":"done","duration_ms":42000}Paste text and read it aloud with Kokoro on your Mac.
Chunk-by-chunk Baskerville teleprompter on screen while it plays.
Apple's native AirPlay button — your AirPods, HomePod, Bluetooth speaker, the kitchen, the dock.
Save the rendered audio as MP3 or M4A — your pick.
JSON chunk stream emit (CLI flag or Super Nerd checkbox) for second-screen / scripts.
One-click uninstall that lists every file.
No URL fetching. Paste the text yourself.
No Services Menu integration (right-click "Read with ReadPep").
No browser extension.
No Siri / verbal Q&A.
No local HTTP server / curl endpoint.
No multi-voice podcast editor.
These land as free v1.1 updates over the coming weeks. Founders Pass holders get them as they ship. No deadline I'm holding to publicly — they arrive when they arrive, fully tested.
One app. One price. No subscription. No quota. Buy ReadPep for what it does today, not for a roadmap.
Most "uninstallers" leave a trail of plists, caches, helper agents and login items scattered across your disk. We hate that. So we did the opposite.
No background helper agents. No login items. No Spotlight-indexed leftovers. ReadPep leaves your Mac the way it found it. That's the deal.
Pepin Labs. We make small, sharp Mac tools and we ship them. That's the whole pitch.
We noticed your Mac was renting voices in 2026 it could have owned. So we shipped this.
Other things we've made: PalettePunk (mocking ugly websites with receipts), the Pepin Discovery Wall (a magazine you don't doom-scroll), and a Hue cinema cue library for film-grade ambient lighting.
We don't sell those. They're the engine. ReadPep is the first thing the engine ships you can hold.