v0.7.3

Fixes a crash on macOS 26 and later.

MoxSpeak checks for updates when it launches. On newer versions of macOS, finishing that check could take the app down on the spot. It never happened on macOS 14 or 15, which is where it was built and tested, so it went out unnoticed in 0.6.0 and 0.7.1. Crash reports from other machines are what caught it.

If MoxSpeak has been quitting on you at launch, this is why. Update and it stops.

Also in this one: the app no longer lets its crash reporter watch network requests at all, which it never needed and which meant a request URL could end up in a crash report.

Install

Open the DMG and drag MoxSpeak to Applications, or brew install --cask guymorita/tap/moxspeak.

Apple silicon, macOS 14 or later. Signed and notarized.

v0.7.2

A damaged model file now tells you what to do instead of quitting on the spot.

The voice model is the biggest thing inside MoxSpeak, about 156 MB. If a copy out of the disk image gets interrupted, that file lands incomplete. MoxSpeak checked that the file was there but not that it could actually be read, so it quit the moment you pressed the shortcut, with no explanation.

• It now says the model is damaged and that reinstalling will fix it.
• If it ever does crash, the report is readable. Crash reports used to come back as raw memory addresses. They now name the actual function and line.

Nothing changes if your install is fine.

Install

Open the DMG and drag MoxSpeak to Applications, or brew install --cask guymorita/tap/moxspeak.

Apple silicon, macOS 14 or later. Signed and notarized.

MoxSpeak 0.7.1

Long sentences no longer break in the middle of a phrase.

An essay paused after "the well" in "potential to become the well balanced contributor" — heard as a break inside a noun phrase and, worse, as the noun well. That sentence is 310 characters with no comma in it, so at the old chunk size it had to be broken somewhere, and it was broken wherever the size limit happened to fall.

• Chunks hold more, so a long sentence like that stays whole.
• When a break is unavoidable it lands before a word that opens a phrase — a preposition, a conjunction, a relative pronoun — which is where a person takes a breath.

Time to first sound is unchanged.

Install

Open the DMG and drag MoxSpeak to Applications, or brew install --cask guymorita/tap/moxspeak.

Apple silicon, macOS 14 or later. Signed and notarized.

MoxSpeak 0.7.0

Reading long things actually works now. This is the release to have.

It reads like prose

Three separate bugs were making paragraphs run together:

• Sentences with nothing between them. Reading a web page can hand over the kitchen.I knock on the door with no separator at all, which left no boundary to find and nothing to pause at. The space is restored.
• Paragraphs sounded like sentences. Measured, a paragraph break came out at 443ms while the sentences around it were 298–452ms. There are now three distinct pauses: 120ms at a comma, 390ms at a sentence, 750ms at a paragraph.
• A single newline between paragraphs wasn't a paragraph break — which is usually what a browser puts on the clipboard.

"She had read the letter" is past tense again. The pronunciation of read, used and wound depends on a part-of-speech call that had no way to reach the right answer.

Controls

MoxSpeak now appears in Control Center and on the lock screen with a real scrubber you can drag. The ⏪ and ⏩ keys move fifteen seconds, the same as a podcast player. Play/pause works from the keyboard or AirPods.

Any launcher can drive it through a moxspeak:// URL — Raycast, Alfred, Shortcuts, Keyboard Maestro. Ready-made Raycast commands are in Integrations.

Fixed

• Changing a shortcut reported "MoxSpeak is shutting down" on success, every time
• A second copy of the app would silently take the shortcut and do nothing with it. Only one runs now
• The default voice is af_heart, the only American English voice Kokoro grades A
• The app icon rendered about 3% smaller than every other icon in the Dock

First launch

Three steps instead of one crowded page, with arrows pointing at the menu bar icon so you know what to look for.

Install

Open the DMG and drag MoxSpeak to Applications, or brew install --cask guymorita/tap/moxspeak.

Apple silicon, macOS 14 or later. Signed and notarized. Tested on macOS 26.

MoxSpeak 0.6.0

Better-sounding speech, and MoxSpeak now tells you when there's a newer version.

Speech

Pauses where the text actually pauses. Headings, list items, nav links and table rows used to run together into one breathless sentence, because every line break became a space. A page like

For Developers

Start with code.

was read as "For Developers Start with code." Now a real line break becomes a real pause, while a soft wrap in a PDF or an email still joins as one sentence.

No more gap between chunks. Kokoro pads every utterance it produces with roughly a second of silence, split across both ends. Joining two pieces stacked those, so long readings stopped for a full second at every boundary. That silence is now stripped and replaced with a pause sized by the punctuation, which also takes about 400ms off the time before you hear anything.

A better default voice. af_heart, the only American English voice Kokoro grades A.

Elsewhere

• MoxSpeak now checks once a day whether a newer version exists, and shows a menu row if so. It never updates itself, sends nothing, and says nothing when it fails.
• Crash reports flush on quit rather than dying with the process.
• Line endings from Windows and web forms are handled, which previously broke paragraph detection entirely.

Install

Open the DMG and drag MoxSpeak to Applications, or brew install --cask guymorita/tap/moxspeak.

Apple silicon, macOS 14 or later. Signed and notarized.

MoxSpeak 0.5.0

First public release.

Select text anywhere on your Mac, press Control + Option + S, and hear it read aloud in a good voice. The model runs on your machine, so there is no server to start, no account, and no network.

Install

Open the DMG and drag MoxSpeak to Applications. It is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens without a Gatekeeper warning.

Or: brew install --cask guymorita/tap/moxspeak

Requires

• Apple silicon (M1 or later). Intel Macs cannot run it; inference uses MLX.
• macOS 14 Sonoma or later.

Shortcuts

Key
⌃⌥S	Speak the selected text
⌃⌥D	Pause or resume
⌃⌥X	Stop

All rebindable from the menu.

Notes

MoxSpeak lives in the menu bar and has no window or Dock icon. If you cannot see it, check whether a menu bar manager such as Ice or Bartender filed it under hidden items.

Select-to-Speak needs Accessibility permission. Without it MoxSpeak still works, but reads whatever you last copied rather than what you selected.

Voices are from Kokoro-82M (Apache-2.0). Privacy details are in the FAQ.