Murmur

A macOS menu bar utility that reads text aloud. Local by default with system voices, optionally cloud-powered via OpenAI TTS for higher quality.

Copy text or select it in any app, press ⌘⇧L, and hear it read aloud.

Features

• Menu bar-only — no dock icon, no main window, just an icon and a dropdown panel
• Universal text extraction — reads selected text from any app via the Accessibility API, with browser-specific smart extraction for Safari and Chrome
• System TTS — AVSpeechSynthesizer works instantly with zero setup, no downloads, no network calls
• OpenAI TTS (optional) — high-quality cloud voices using your own API key
• Global hotkey — ⌘⇧L to toggle reading (customizable via settings)
• Privacy-first — system voice path is fully on-device with no network calls

Requirements

• macOS 15 Sonoma or later
• Apple Silicon (M1+)
• Xcode 26+ with Swift 6.2

Building

Murmur uses XcodeGen to generate its Xcode project from project.yml.

# Install XcodeGen (if needed)
brew install xcodegen

# Generate the Xcode project
xcodegen generate

# Build
xcodebuild -project Murmur.xcodeproj -scheme Murmur -configuration Debug build

OpenAI TTS Setup

To use OpenAI's high-quality voices:

1. Open Murmur settings (click the menu bar icon → Settings)
2. Switch the voice engine to OpenAI
3. Enter your OpenAI API key
4. Choose a voice (default: Nova)

An API key is only required for OpenAI voices. System voices work without any configuration.

Tech Stack

• Swift 6.2 with strict concurrency
• SwiftUI + AppKit hybrid for menu bar integration
• AXorcist for Accessibility API text extraction
• SwiftReadability for browser content extraction
• KeyboardShortcuts for global hotkey registration
• Defaults for type-safe UserDefaults
• LaunchAtLogin-Modern for launch at login

License

MIT License — see LICENSE for details.