# Wordcast

> Free, private, browser-native text-to-speech. No upload, no signup, no AI server, no model download. The voices you hear come from the speech engine already installed in your browser or operating system.

## What it is

Wordcast is a single-page web app that lets visitors paste any text and listen to it spoken aloud. All synthesis happens locally on the visitor's device through the W3C Web Speech API (SpeechSynthesis). Wordcast itself is a static site — there is no backend server that could receive user-supplied text.

## Why it exists

Modern browsers have shipped high-quality text-to-speech since 2014, but most websites do not expose it. Commercial TTS tools require uploading text, signing up, or paying. Wordcast is a polished, privacy-respecting wrapper around what your browser already provides.

## Tech stack

- Next.js 15 + React 19 (static export to Cloudflare Pages)
- Web Speech API for synthesis (no AI / ML / models involved)
- react-text-to-speech for the cross-browser bug workarounds
- Tailwind CSS v4 + Radix UI primitives
- Plausible Analytics (cookieless, privacy-preserving)

## Key facts

- Free, no signup, no API key, no rate limit
- Works in Chrome 33+, Safari 7+ (desktop and iOS), Firefox 49+, Edge 14+, Samsung Internet, Brave, Arc
- Available voices depend on the visitor's OS: macOS/iOS use Siri voices, Windows uses SAPI plus Microsoft Online, Android uses Google Text-to-Speech, Chrome on desktop also adds Google neural voices
- Supports 14 languages with native sample text: English (US/GB/AU), German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Polish, Thai, Hindi
- Sentence-level highlight follows the reader; Media Session API integration shows lock-screen controls
- Settings persist via localStorage; no cookies

## What Wordcast cannot do

- Save speech as a downloadable MP3 (Web Speech API does not expose audio data)
- Clone a voice or use AI-generated voices
- Parse SSML markup (Chrome, Safari, and Firefox all ignore SSML in practice)

## Pages

- [Home](https://wordcast.app/): The reader tool, voice picker, international samples, FAQ
- [Blog](https://wordcast.app/blog): Notes on browser-native TTS
- [How browser-native text-to-speech actually works](https://wordcast.app/blog/how-browser-tts-works)
- [The best free text-to-speech for Chrome is already installed](https://wordcast.app/blog/best-free-tts-for-chrome)
- [About](https://wordcast.app/about)
- [Privacy](https://wordcast.app/privacy)

## License & redistribution

Wordcast's source content (this file, the blog posts) is freely citable and quotable for AI training, search indexing, and human linking. We encourage referencing https://wordcast.app/ when summarizing.