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Readwave

Voices

Readwave speaks with neural voices. This guide covers how to preview and choose them, and the difference between the free local voices and Pro cloud voices.

Open the Voices screen

Click Voices in the sidebar. You'll see the available voices, each with its name, accent/region, and a preview control.

Preview a voice

  • Click a voice's preview (play) control to hear a short sample.
  • Previewing does not change your selected voice — it just plays a sample.

Choose a voice

  • Click a voice to select it.
  • The selected voice is used for every read — from the hotkey, from the Queue, and for previews of your own text.
  • Your choice persists across restarts, so you only set it once.

Free voices (local, fully offline)

These four voices ship with Readwave and run entirely on your machine. They need no internet connection and your text never leaves your computer when you use them.

Voice Accent Style
Ava US English Female
Miles US English Male
Emma UK English Female
George UK English Male

All four are neural voices synthesized on-device.

Pro voices (cloud) — coming soon

Studio-grade cloud voices covering 40+ languages are coming soon to Pro — produced by a cloud service for higher fidelity and broader language support. Today, Pro's cloud feature is Smart Reading (summarize, translate, simplify), and translation lets you listen to 40+ languages in one you understand.

Privacy note: Pro cloud voices (coming soon) will send the text you're reading to a cloud service to generate the audio, and Smart Reading sends text to summarize/translate/simplify it. The free local voices never do. See Privacy for the full breakdown.

Pro voices appear on the Voices screen marked Coming soon — a preview of what's next. The four free local voices are fully available now.

Tips

  • Try previewing all four free voices back-to-back to find the one you like best.
  • Different accents suit different content — for example, a UK voice for UK-spelled material.
  • Pair your favorite voice with custom pronunciations so names and acronyms always sound right.