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 1.6.7 is out, and it's about what happens at the edges: very long text, very fast copying, and very wide screens.
Here's the two-minute tour (the real app, real voices; sound on):
Limits that protect you from accidents
A tray app that reads your clipboard has to cope with whatever lands there. Four small limits came out of that:
- Auto-Read on Copy stops at 10,000 characters (about 9 minutes of speech). An accidental Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C on a long document shouldn't start a very long reading. The Reader, tray and hotkey keep the 100,000-character limit, because there you asked for it.
- One shared limit for online requests: 10 every 10 seconds. Copying many texts in a row with Auto-Read on could otherwise earn an HTTP 429 from Microsoft. Normal reading never gets near it, and offline voices don't need it.
- Huge pastes no longer freeze the window. Text far beyond the limit is dropped before cleaning, and the Reader's language label only looks at the start of the text. A 5 MB paste went from 2.1 s to 0.07 s.
- Offline voice downloads check free disk space first. If the drive is too full, FluentVoice says how much is needed and how much is free, and downloads nothing.
New option: see what Auto-Read is reading
A switch under Auto-Read on Copy (off by default) shows the copied text in the Direct Text Reader while Settings is open. The rules matter more than the feature:
- It only replaces an empty box, the starter text or its own earlier text, so it never overwrites what you typed.
- Private and password-like copies never appear.
- The text isn't written to disk.
A Settings window that stays tidy when maximized
Maximized on a wide monitor, everything used to stretch from one edge of the screen to the other. Now the header, all five tabs and the footer keep a comfortable width (about 1,100 points), centred, and the sliders and main buttons keep a fixed size. At the normal window size nothing changes.
The tray, which is where most of the app lives:
Everything else, at a glance
Get it (free)
- Microsoft Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N293MJ0MD9F (free, updates automatically, already on 1.6.7)
- GitHub release: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/fluentvoice-pro/releases/tag/v1.6.7 (source ZIP, portable EXE, MSIX, all attested)
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Scoop:
scoop bucket add nickotmazgin https://github.com/nickotmazgin/scoop-bucket, thenscoop install nickotmazgin/fluentvoicepro
Source and changelog: https://github.com/nickotmazgin/fluentvoice-pro. Feedback and bug reports are welcome in the comments or on GitHub.
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