DEV Community: Nick Otmazgin

Numeric Clock 17.7: a numeric date and time for the GNOME top bar, with GNOME 51, menu styles, About and Donate

Nick Otmazgin — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 13:04:44 +0000

GNOME's top bar shows the time as Oct 22 13:17, and there is no setting to change that. Numeric Clock is my free, open-source GNOME Shell extension that turns it into a clear numeric date and time: 22/10/2026 13:17:05, 2026-10-22 13:17, 10/22/2026 01:17:05 PM, or any other strftime format you like. It works on GNOME Shell 45–51, on Wayland and X11.

Versions 17.6 and 17.7 are the biggest update in a while, so here is a quick tour first:

New in 17.7: About and Donate, and the menu opens where you click

About Numeric Clock and Donate are now right in the quick menu, both from the tray icon and from a right-click on the clock. About opens Preferences straight on its About page.
Fixed: after right-clicking the clock, the next left-click on the tray icon opened the menu over by the clock. The menu now always opens under whatever you clicked. Spotted in daily use, fixed the same day.

Each click on the tray icon does something different

The clock icon in the top bar used to open the same menu on every click. Now:

Left-click opens the quick menu: copy the time, pick a preset, change the menu style, open Preferences or About, or donate.
Right-click opens Preferences.
Middle-click copies the current time to the clipboard.

Right- and middle-click are configurable (quick menu, Preferences or copy time), and hovering the icon shows the time plus a reminder of what each click does.

You can also right-click the clock itself for the same menu, which opens right under the clock. A left-click on the clock still opens the GNOME calendar.

Menu styles: System, Light or Dark

The quick menu and its tooltip follow your shell theme by default, or you can make them always light or always dark, from Preferences or straight from the menu.

Eight presets, one click each

International (DD/MM with seconds), weekday, compact, time only, ISO 8601, ISO date with the week number (new), US 12-hour, and top bar only. Each preset in Preferences shows a live sample, so you see the result before you apply it.

Rebuilt Preferences

Preferences now use libadwaita rows bound straight to the settings, so a change made from the panel menu shows up live. There is a live preview, a built-in list of format codes, the menu style, and what each click on the icon does.

Fixes that came out of an audit (17.5)

Before adding features I went through the clock engine line by line, and found real bugs:

Seconds could lag by up to a second. After the first tick, "smooth tick" used GLib.timeout_add_seconds(), which GLib shifts by a per-session offset to save power. Each tick now lands within about 10 ms of the second boundary.
An invalid or empty format blanked the clock. GLib.DateTime.format() returns null instead of throwing, so the old try/catch never caught it. Both now fall back to the default format.
Disabling the extension left your format on screen until GNOME's next minute tick. The stock clock now comes back immediately.
With "Only change the top bar clock" turned off, any label containing a day or month word, or a time like "meeting at 10:30", could be overwritten, including notifications. Now a label is only touched when its whole text looks like a clock.
The panel icon was redrawn on the 16 px pixel grid, so it is crisp next to the other status icons.

And one fix in 17.6.1: Preferences opened with the format field focused and selected, and every key press was saved, so a stray key could replace your whole format. The format is now saved only when you press Enter, and formats without any % code are refused.

Install or update

Download numeric-clock@nickotmazgin.v32.shell-extension.zip from GitHub Releases, then:

gnome-extensions install --force numeric-clock@nickotmazgin.v32.shell-extension.zip
gnome-extensions enable numeric-clock@nickotmazgin

On Wayland, log out and back in. On X11, press Alt+F2, type r and press Enter.

Every release is built by GitHub Actions from an SSH-signed tag, is immutable, and has a build-provenance attestation. You can check a download yourself:

gh attestation verify numeric-clock@nickotmazgin.v32.shell-extension.zip --repo nickotmazgin/Linux-Numeric-Date-And-Clock

How it is tested

An isolated nested GNOME Shell smoke test (its own D-Bus session and settings) runs 36 checks: formats, tick alignment, menus and where they open, click actions, menu styles, About, and disable/enable cycles.
A Preferences test runs in plain gjs.
ESLint, ShellCheck and CodeQL run on every pull request, and main requires all of them plus signed commits.

The demo video above was recorded the same way, inside that nested shell, so nothing on my real desktop was clicked. The narration is Kokoro-82M (Apache-2.0) and the music is an original synthesised track.

Compatibility

	Status
GNOME Shell 45–51	Supported
X11 / Xorg	Supported and tested daily (Zorin OS 18.1, GNOME 46)
Wayland	Supported; passes the nested Wayland smoke test
Network access	None, no telemetry

Links

GitHub: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/Linux-Numeric-Date-And-Clock
Latest release: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/Linux-Numeric-Date-And-Clock/releases/latest
Changelog: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/Linux-Numeric-Date-And-Clock/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md
Announcement and questions: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/Linux-Numeric-Date-And-Clock/discussions/76
Demo on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VlcEy6rQHBw

My other GNOME extensions: ClipFlow Pro (clipboard history) and Comfort Control (EaseHub) (a compact panel menu).

Numeric Clock is free and MIT licensed. I direct, review, test and sign every release; AI coding assistants (including Claude Code) helped with parts of this work, and the README credits them. If it saves you a squint at the top bar, a ⭐ on GitHub helps other GNOME users find it.

EaseHub 1.3.0: a compact GNOME menu, with sound and Files right-click actions

Nick Otmazgin — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 16:13:30 +0000

EaseHub 1.3.0 is out. It is my free, open-source panel menu for GNOME Shell 45–51 (Wayland and X11). This release replaces the long one-item-per-row list with a compact menu, adds a volume row, and puts EaseHub actions in the Files right-click menu.

A menu that fits on the screen

The old menu was about 23 rows. The new compact layout, which is the default, is about 10:

a row of power buttons
a volume row: mute, down, a slider and up, for the current output device
quick-toggle tiles
four groups you can open and close
a footer

Classic (one row per item) is still there, in Preferences.

The quick toggles are Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Airplane Mode, Do Not Disturb, Dark Mode, Night Light and Keep Awake (the screen stays on, and the computer does not sleep, while it is on). A tile hides itself when the hardware or service is not there. Tiles update live if Dark Mode, Do Not Disturb or Night Light change somewhere else while the menu is open.

Every icon-only control has a tooltip with the full name and the current state, for example "Do Not Disturb: Off" or "Volume: 70%".

The four groups

Apps & Files opens Files, Settings, Extensions, Tweaks and a terminal. Empty Trash tells you how many items are in there and asks first. Clear Recent Files asks first too. The same group has the switch for the Files right-click menu, and a shortcut into its settings.

Clipboard & Screenshot opens GNOME's built-in screenshot tool (area, screen, window or screencast), and can clear the clipboard or the primary selection.

Updates & System checks for updates and upgrades packages (APT, DNF, Zypper, Pacman and Flatpak) in your terminal. It asks before an upgrade proceeds. The tour opens that confirm dialog and closes it. On X11 this group also has Reload GNOME Shell.

Sudo Timeout shows the current value (for example "Sudo Timeout (60 min)"), plus Forget Password Now and a custom minutes entry. Sharing one login across all terminals (timestamp_type=global) is optional and off by default.

The footer has the new panel icon (a hub; you can pick another), and Appearance: System (follows your shell theme), Light, or Dark. That choice covers the EaseHub menu and its tooltips, so it stays readable on a light theme and on a dark one.

There is also a keyboard shortcut to open the menu. None is set until you choose one.

Files, right-click, Scripts ▸ EaseHub

This is off until you turn it on (Preferences → Files, or the switch in Apps & Files). It adds actions under Scripts ▸ EaseHub in Files (Nautilus):

Copy: name, full path, path and name, parent folder, path from home (~), a shell-safe quoted path, the file URI
Open: terminal here, or your editor
Tools: size and type, SHA-256 checksum, make executable

You can keep that grouping, or flatten it. You can rename the menu or any action, hide actions, and turn notifications on or off. It uses your EaseHub terminal. Symbolic links copy the path you clicked, not the target. Broken links, spaces, quotes and non-Latin names are fine. Sizes are real file sizes.

EaseHub only removes files it created. Anything you add yourself under that scripts folder is kept. Turning the option off removes the menu.

Settings, each tab

Preferences now have a Menu page (show or hide every item, and the sudo timeout options) and a Files page. They reopen on the page you used last. Reset all settings asks first. Settings you already had from 1.2 are kept: items you had hidden stay hidden, and the new items appear.

The two-minute tour

The narrated tour opens the panel menu with every quick toggle (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Airplane Mode, Do Not Disturb, Dark Mode, Night Light, Keep Awake), each group, the Files right-click actions, and every Settings tab from top to bottom.

Install or update

Download comfort-control@nickotmazgin-45-51.shell-extension.zip from GitHub Releases, then:

gnome-extensions install --force comfort-control@nickotmazgin-45-51.shell-extension.zip
gnome-extensions enable comfort-control@nickotmazgin

On Wayland, log out and back in. On X11, press Alt+F2, type r and press Enter.

Every release is built by GitHub Actions from a signed tag, is immutable, and has a build-provenance attestation. You can check a download yourself:

gh attestation verify comfort-control@nickotmazgin-45-51.shell-extension.zip --repo nickotmazgin/comfort-control-easehub

Compatibility

	Status
GNOME Shell 45–51	Supported
X11 / Xorg	Supported and tested (Zorin OS, GNOME 46)
Wayland	Supported; reports are welcome
GNOME Shell 42–44	No longer built

Reports from Wayland and from GNOME 47–51 are very welcome in Discussions.

Links

GitHub: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/comfort-control-easehub
Release 1.3.0: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/comfort-control-easehub/releases/tag/v1.3.0
Discussion: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/comfort-control-easehub/discussions/73
Changelog: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/comfort-control-easehub/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md
Demo on YouTube: https://youtu.be/5A7521LUAQ8

EaseHub is free and MIT licensed. I direct, review, test and sign every release; AI coding assistants helped with parts of this work, and the README credits them. If it saves you time, a ⭐ on GitHub helps other GNOME users find it.

ClipFlow Pro 1.5.8: respects password managers and works with light GNOME themes

Nick Otmazgin — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 10:33:19 +0000

Two releases of ClipFlow Pro, my free, open-source clipboard history manager for GNOME Shell 45–51 (Wayland and X11), came out after my first post about 1.5.6. Both came from user feedback, and each one fixes something you'd only notice at the worst moment.

1.5.7: passwords from your password manager are no longer saved

A reader on Threads asked a good question: does the password filter use hints from password managers, or does it only inspect the copied text? At the time, it only inspected the text. Now it does both.

When you copy a password from KeePassXC (and other password managers that do this), they add a small marker next to it on the clipboard: x-kde-passwordManagerHint = secret. ClipFlow Pro 1.5.7 reads that marker on every clipboard path (X11, the fallback path and Wayland):

With Ignore Password-like Content on (the default), a marked clip is not saved to your history.
With it off, the clip is saved but flagged as sensitive.

There was a catch. When the password manager closes, GNOME offers the same text again, this time without the marker. To catch that copy too, ClipFlow Pro remembers a SHA-256 hash of recently marked clips (never the text itself, at most 32, in memory only) and skips a clip whose hash matches.

The existing check for password-like text and common API tokens still runs as before.

Tested with the real thing: on Zorin OS 18.1 / GNOME 46 / X11 with KeePassXC 2.7.6, a random password copied with Ctrl+C was not saved, a normal clip copied right after was saved, and quitting KeePassXC left nothing in the history.

1.5.8: readable on light shell themes

With a light shell theme (for example Zorin Light), the right-click recent clips menu showed white text on a light background, which was nearly impossible to read. In 1.5.8:

The recent clips menu now uses the same self-contained dark surface as the panel menu, with matching hover and focus colors, so both menus are readable on light and dark themes.
Disable Extension Stylesheet (Settings → Appearance) now really hands both menus back to your shell theme's own colors. Before, it only affected the panel menu.

I checked it on screen with the ZorinBlue-Light and Catppuccin Mocha (dark) themes: the recent clips menu, the panel menu, Actions, the history window and every settings tab.

No new buttons or switches: the two existing settings, Ignore Password-like Content and Disable Extension Stylesheet, simply do more now.

A quick look again

And the 2-minute narrated tour (everything in it still applies to 1.5.8):

Install or update

Download clipflow-pro@nickotmazgin.github.io-1.5.8-gs45-51.zip from GitHub Releases, then:

gnome-extensions install --force clipflow-pro@nickotmazgin.github.io-1.5.8-gs45-51.zip
gnome-extensions enable clipflow-pro@nickotmazgin.github.io

On Wayland, log out and back in. On X11, press Alt+F2, type r and press Enter.

Every release is built by GitHub Actions from a signed tag, is immutable, and has a build-provenance attestation. You can check a download yourself:

gh attestation verify clipflow-pro@nickotmazgin.github.io-1.5.8-gs45-51.zip --repo nickotmazgin/clipflow-pro

Compatibility

	Status
GNOME Shell 45–51	Supported
X11 / Xorg	Supported and tested daily (Zorin OS 18.1, GNOME 46)
Wayland	Supported; reports are welcome
Password-manager marker	Tested with KeePassXC 2.7.6

Reports from Wayland, GNOME 51 and other password managers are very welcome in Discussions.

Links

GitHub: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/clipflow-pro
Release 1.5.8: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/clipflow-pro/releases/latest
Changelog: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/clipflow-pro/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md
AlternativeTo: https://alternativeto.net/software/clipflow-pro/about/
Demo on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Cao9ljjI5JI

ClipFlow Pro is free and GPL-3.0 licensed. I direct, review, test and sign every release; AI coding assistants (including Claude Code) helped with parts of this work, and the README credits them. If it saves you time, a ⭐ on GitHub helps other GNOME users find it.

ClipFlow Pro 1.5.6: a free, open-source clipboard history manager for GNOME 45–51 (Wayland & X11)

Nick Otmazgin — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 13:56:33 +0000

ClipFlow Pro is a free, open-source clipboard history manager for GNOME Shell 45–51, on both Wayland and X11/Xorg. It sits in the top bar, remembers what you copy, and gives you a searchable history window, quick panel menus and pinned clips. Version 1.5.6 is out, and this is the first time I'm writing about it here.

Here's the 2-minute narrated tour, so turn the sound on:

Why I built it

I copy a lot during the day: commands, links, code, JSON, notes in several languages. GNOME has no clipboard history built in, so the moment I copied something new, the previous thing was gone. I wanted a clipboard manager that:

feels like part of GNOME, not a separate app
works the same on Wayland and X11
keeps everything on my own computer
lets me find an old clip by typing a few letters

That became ClipFlow Pro.

What it does

History window: left-click the panel icon to open it. Type to search instantly, double-click an entry to insert it into the app you were using, right-click for copy, insert, pin, star and delete. You can select several entries and delete them together.
Recent clips menu: right-click the panel icon for a quick list of your latest clips.
Panel menu: the full menu with the ⋮ menu on each clip and an Actions section (export, import, purge duplicates, pause monitoring and more).
Pinned and starred clips in their own sections at the top.
Content-type detection for links, email addresses, file paths, code and JSON.
Every kind of text: emoji, symbols and other languages, including right-to-left text like Hebrew and Arabic.
Privacy options: password filtering, pause monitoring, clear history on lock or logout.
Export and import of your history.
Reset to Defaults in Settings → About restores all 50 settings and keeps your history.

The history window

The panel menus

Settings

Five tabs: General, Behavior, Appearance, Shortcuts and About.

The full gallery, with every menu and settings tab, is in the README.

Your clipboard stays on your computer

A clipboard manager sees everything you copy, so privacy came first:

History is stored locally in your home folder, in files only you can read (0600), written atomically. Nothing is sent anywhere.
On X11 it reads the clipboard through GNOME's own St.Clipboard, so there's no helper process on every check.
When text has to go to a helper like wl-copy or xclip, it's passed on standard input, never in temporary files or command-line arguments that other programs could see.
Password-like entries can be filtered out, and the history can be cleared automatically when you lock the screen or log out.

What's new in 1.5.5 and 1.5.6

GNOME Shell 51 support (1.5.5). ClipFlow Pro installs and runs on GNOME 51, the September 2026 release. I checked the code against the official porting guide; it was already free of the APIs GNOME 51 removed (St vertical, async disable(), pointerWatcher, GLSLEffect).
No default clipboard shortcuts (1.5.6). Super+C and Super+Shift+H are no longer set out of the box. Left-click on the panel icon still opens the history window, and you can add the shortcuts you want in Settings → Shortcuts, which suggests a combination for each one.
Clearer clipboard notice (1.5.6). The extension's description now says plainly that it reads and stores your clipboard locally and sends nothing anywhere.

Suggested shortcuts

Action	Suggested shortcut
Open the history window	Super+Shift+H
Open the recent clips menu	Super+Shift+R
Paste the latest entry	Super+Shift+Insert
Paste the entry before it	Super+Shift+V
Enhanced copy	Super+Shift+C

Install

Download clipflow-pro@nickotmazgin.github.io-1.5.6-gs45-51.zip from GitHub Releases, then:

gnome-extensions install --force clipflow-pro@nickotmazgin.github.io-1.5.6-gs45-51.zip
gnome-extensions enable clipflow-pro@nickotmazgin.github.io

On Wayland, log out and back in. On X11, press Alt+F2, type r and press Enter.

Or build it from source:

git clone https://github.com/nickotmazgin/clipflow-pro.git
cd clipflow-pro
./build.sh && ./install.sh

Each release is built by GitHub Actions, the tag is signed, and the zip has a build-provenance attestation, so you can check that it came from the repository.

Compatibility

	Status
GNOME Shell 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51	Supported
X11 / Xorg	Supported and tested daily (Zorin OS 18.1, GNOME 46)
Wayland	Supported; reports are welcome
GNOME 43–44	No longer supported

How it's made

ClipFlow Pro is written in GJS (GNOME's JavaScript) as modern ES modules. Releases go through CI that lints the code and validates the zip before anything is published. I'm the only maintainer: I direct and review every change, test it on a real GNOME desktop, and sign and release every version. AI coding assistants (OpenAI Codex, Cursor and Claude Code) helped with parts of the work, always under my review, and the README credits them.

GNOME #Linux #OpenSource #Wayland #ClipboardManager #FOSS

FluentVoice Pro 1.6.4: online voices back on Microsoft's original server

Nick Otmazgin — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 20:14:50 +0000

FluentVoice Pro 1.6.4 is out: the Microsoft online voices are back on their original server.

In October 2026 Microsoft's classic voice server started refusing connections (HTTP 403) for every app built on edge-tts (edge-tts #490). FluentVoice 1.6.3 worked around that by switching to Microsoft's newer server. Upstream edge-tts 7.3.0 / 7.3.1 fixed the outage, so 1.6.4 requires edge-tts 7.3.1 and reads from the classic server again. The 1.6.3 failover stays as a safety net.

Also new: if Microsoft briefly limits requests after many readings (HTTP 429), Test providers now says so in plain words and suggests waiting a minute or using an offline voice.

GitHub release: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/fluentvoice-pro/releases/tag/v1.6.4
Discussion: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/fluentvoice-pro/discussions/72
Microsoft Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N293MJ0MD9F (1.6.4 is live)
Scoop: scoop update fluentvoicepro

Earlier write-up for the 1.6.3 health check and failover: https://dev.to/nickotmazgin/fluentvoice-pro-163-the-microsoft-online-voices-work-again-plus-a-health-check-that-says-what-2bfh

Some AI assistance was used while preparing this post.

FluentVoice Pro 1.6.3: the Microsoft online voices work again, plus a health check that says what to fix

Nick Otmazgin — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 10:48:14 +0000

FluentVoice Pro is my free, open-source text-to-speech tray app for Windows 11 and 10: select or copy text anywhere, press a hotkey, and it reads it aloud with natural Microsoft online voices, offline HD voices (Piper and Kokoro) or the built-in Windows voices. Version 1.6.3 is out, and it's mostly about one thing: the online voices stopped working for a lot of people this year, and now they work again.

Here's the 75-second tour of what's new (the real app, real voices; sound on):

The Microsoft online voices work again

FluentVoice, like many apps, uses edge-tts to reach the same neural voices Microsoft Edge uses for Read Aloud. In 2026 Microsoft's classic endpoint started answering many users with HTTP 403 (edge-tts #490), for every edge-tts based app, and there's no upstream fix yet. FluentVoice already fell back to an offline voice when that happened, so you still heard the text, just not with the voice you picked.

1.6.3 fixes it on our side. When the classic server refuses with a 403, FluentVoice points edge-tts at Microsoft's newer server for the same voices (api.msedgeservices.com) and keeps using it for the rest of the session. A few details:

edge-tts itself isn't modified (it's LGPL, and I want to drop the workaround the day upstream ships a fix). It reads its websocket URL at connect time, so the switch is one assignment behind a lock.
It only reacts to a real 403. Timeouts, DNS errors or "no audio" keep their existing handling, so a flaky Wi-Fi doesn't move you to a different server.
I tested all 80 online voices in 22 languages on the new server: every one answered, with a median of about 1.1 s to first audio.
One lesson from CodeQL: the new server's URL carries a client key, so the log line names the host only and never the full URL.

Every language, the right voice

Two language-detection fixes:

Chinese, Japanese and Korean text with English names is detected correctly. "欢迎使用 FluentVoice Pro" used to count as English, because one CJK character weighed as much as one Latin letter. Each CJK character now counts like a short word, and a test checks that every language's sample sentence is detected as that language.
Languages FluentVoice has no voices of its own for (Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Swedish, Vietnamese, Finnish, Greek and more) are read by a Multilingual voice instead of an English one, and Settings shows the real name ("Lang: Dutch (Multilingual voice)"). Short snippets keep the current voice, and text the detector isn't sure about still counts as English.

New: a health check that tells you what to fix

When a TTS app goes quiet, the user usually can't tell whether it's their internet, a firewall, Microsoft, the audio device or a hotkey that another app grabbed. Settings → About & Developer now has a Components & sources panel:

Test providers runs live checks of the online voices, the offline HD voices, the Windows voices, the tray and hotkeys, the audio output and the last 24 hours of errors in the log. Each problem comes with a plain-language diagnosis, what to do, and the alternatives: "not connected to the internet" is told apart from "a firewall blocks the voice server" and from "Microsoft refuses the connection".
Verify / repair offline voices re-hashes every downloaded Piper / Kokoro file against the SHA-256 pinned in the app, and offers to download damaged ones again, only from the official hosts.
Components lists the version, licence and source of everything FluentVoice is built from.

Everything else, at a glance

Still there from earlier releases: 57 offline HD voices in 16 languages that never send text anywhere, an Offline-only privacy mode, a hotkey that reads your selection (and an optional Stop hotkey), voice fallback that returns to online by itself, single-stream playback so voices never overlap, and a release pipeline with attested builds and SHA256SUMS.txt.

The full 5-minute tour of the app is here: https://youtu.be/jpwKR2xFVRA

Get it (free)

Microsoft Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N293MJ0MD9F (updates automatically; 1.6.3 arrives after Microsoft's certification)
GitHub release: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/fluentvoice-pro/releases/tag/v1.6.3 (source ZIP, portable EXE, MSIX, all attested)
Scoop: scoop bucket add nickotmazgin https://github.com/nickotmazgin/scoop-bucket, then scoop install nickotmazgin/fluentvoicepro

Source, changelog and screenshots: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/fluentvoice-pro · Release notes and questions: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/fluentvoice-pro/discussions/66

If you build on edge-tts and hit the 403, the failover is about 50 lines in fluentvoice/core.py; feel free to borrow the idea. Feedback and bug reports are welcome in the comments or on GitHub.

FluentVoice Pro 1.6.1 is now in the Microsoft Store: free, open-source text-to-speech for Windows

Nick Otmazgin — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 12:03:08 +0000

FluentVoice Pro 1.6.1 is now in the Microsoft Store 🎙️ It's a free, open-source text-to-speech app for Windows 11/10 with 80 online voices, 57 offline HD voices and an Offline-only privacy mode.

Here's the 5-minute demo with real voices, so turn the sound on:

What it is

FluentVoice Pro sits in the system tray and reads text aloud from any app: browsers, PDF readers, Office, VS Code, Cursor, Slack, terminals. It isn't a browser extension, and it stays light in the background (about 30–60 MB of RAM).

Global hotkey: select text and press Ctrl+Shift+Space (configurable) to start or stop reading, from any app.
Auto-Read on Copy: optionally, newly copied text is read aloud.
Direct Text Reader: a scratchpad window for pasting and reading long articles, notes or PDFs.

The voices

80 Microsoft online voices in 22 languages, with a male and a female voice for every language.
57 offline HD voices that run on your PC: 29 Piper voices and 28 Kokoro voices. Every download is pinned by SHA-256 and comes only from the official hosts.
Every Windows voice you already have, both the classic SAPI5 voices and the newer OneCore voices.
Smart language routing: it detects the language of the text and picks a matching voice.
Offline-only privacy mode: your text never leaves the computer.

Now in the Microsoft Store

The Store version is free, signed by Microsoft and updates automatically, and you don't need Python. Windows handles Start with Windows, and the app appears in the Start menu.

Get FluentVoice Pro from the Microsoft Store, or install it from a terminal:

winget install 9N293MJ0MD9F --source msstore

What's new in 1.6.1

Tidier Settings in the Store version. I found these by running the Store package on a real PC. The app no longer shows switches that the Store or Windows handle (Start with Windows, GitHub update checks), and the help text describes the Store version.
Release ZIPs follow the ZIP format. Compress-Archive in Windows PowerShell 5.1 writes backslashes into the paths inside a ZIP. The ZIP format requires forward slashes, so winget's local archive scan reported a false "malware" result. A small Python script now builds the release ZIPs, and the same files pass the scan.

Other ways to install

Portable ZIP from GitHub Releases: built by GitHub Actions, with a build-provenance attestation and SHA256SUMS.txt.
Scoop:

scoop bucket add nickotmazgin https://github.com/nickotmazgin/scoop-bucket
scoop install nickotmazgin/fluentvoicepro

It's also listed on AlternativeTo, where you can leave a review or suggest it as an alternative:

TextToSpeech #Windows11 #Windows10 #OpenSource #Accessibility #Python #MicrosoftStore #Piper #Kokoro #FOSS

Adding offline HD voices to a Windows text-to-speech app (Piper + Kokoro, verified downloads)

Nick Otmazgin — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 12:10:41 +0000

FluentVoice Pro is a small open-source tray app for Windows 11 and 10 that reads selected or copied text aloud. Until version 1.5, every natural-sounding voice came from Microsoft's online voices. They sound great, but they need the internet, and some people don't want their text to leave the PC at all.

So in v1.5.0 I added offline HD voices that run entirely on the user's computer. Here's how it works, and what I learned along the way.

Two engines: Piper and Kokoro

Piper (via piper-tts): fast, small models (60-115 MB each) and lots of languages. The app ships a catalogue of 29 voices in 15 languages.
Kokoro (via sherpa-onnx): one 350 MB pack with very natural voices for English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Hindi.

Nothing is bundled with the app: a voice is downloaded only when the user picks it in Settings > Voice Providers.

Downloads you can trust

Downloading model files from the internet is exactly where a desktop app can get hurt, so every file is treated as untrusted until proven otherwise:

Allow-listed hosts only: Hugging Face (the official Piper voice library) and the official sherpa-onnx release on GitHub. Any other host, including redirects, is refused.
Pinned SHA-256 and size for every single file in the catalogue. A file that doesn't match is deleted and never loaded, and it is checked again the first time it's used.
Safe archive extraction: the Kokoro pack is a .tar.bz2, and extraction rejects absolute paths, .. traversal and links.

Licences, voice by voice

"Open model" doesn't mean "free to use however you like". Each voice's training data has its own licence, so the app shows a badge next to every voice:

Free to use: public domain, CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA, Apache-2.0
Personal use only: for example non-commercial recordings; the app asks for confirmation before downloading these

Voices trained on research-only data were left out, and so were Kokoro voices named after other companies' voices. The full table is generated from the catalogue into docs/VOICE_LICENSES.md.

Privacy mode and fallback

With Offline only switched on, no text is ever sent to an online voice: each language is read by a downloaded offline voice or a built-in Windows voice. And when the online voice is simply unreachable, reading continues with an offline voice in the same language. Before, a Hebrew text would fall back to an English Windows voice.

Try it

Microsoft Store (free, signed by Microsoft, automatic updates): https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N293MJ0MD9F
Download (portable EXE, no Python needed): https://github.com/nickotmazgin/fluentvoice-pro/releases/latest
Or with Scoop: scoop bucket add nickotmazgin https://github.com/nickotmazgin/scoop-bucket then scoop install nickotmazgin/fluentvoicepro
Source code (MIT): https://github.com/nickotmazgin/fluentvoice-pro
On AlternativeTo: https://alternativeto.net/software/fluentvoice-pro/about/

Feedback, bug reports and voice suggestions are very welcome in GitHub Discussions.

This article was drafted by an AI assistant (Claude) from the project's code and docs, at my request, and published by me.