Free Text to Audiobook

Yes, it is completely free with no signup, no account, and no usage limits. Because the Kokoro model runs on your own hardware through kokoro-js instead of a paid cloud API, there are no per-character or per-minute costs to pass on. You can convert as much text into audio as you want, as often as you want, without a credit card, an API key, or a rate limit. Paid narration services like ElevenLabs start around 5 dollars per month and meter you by characters, and audiobook apps like Speechify Premium run about 139 dollars per year, while this tool is free with no cap.

No. The entire narration process runs locally in your browser using kokoro-js and WebAssembly. After the model is downloaded once, every chunk of text is turned into audio on your own device with zero network requests carrying your content, and the MP3 is encoded on-device too. Your text is never uploaded, logged, stored, or seen by anyone, which makes this safe for confidential notes, drafts, and private documents that should not touch a cloud service. You can confirm this by opening the Network tab in your browser DevTools while you generate.

It uses Kokoro (hexgrad/kokoro), an open-weight 82 million parameter text-to-speech model, loaded through the kokoro-js library from the onnx-community/Kokoro-82M-v1.0-ONNX weights on the Hugging Face Hub. The model is roughly 300MB and downloads once on first use, then is cached by your browser so later audiobooks start without re-downloading. That cache is shared with the text-to-speech tool on this site, so if you have used that tool the model is already available here.

The tool automatically splits your text into sentence-sized chunks of at most about 480 characters, packing whole sentences together up to that limit and hard-splitting any single sentence that is longer. It narrates each chunk with Kokoro, shows chunk by chunk progress, then concatenates all the audio into one continuous track and encodes it as a single MP3. This means there is no practical length limit on the input beyond how long you are willing to let it run on your device.

You get a single MP3 file encoded at 128 kbps, which plays in every phone, browser, media player, and podcast app. The MP3 is created entirely in your browser using a WebAssembly encoder, so nothing is uploaded to produce it. You can preview it in the built-in player, check the total duration and file size, and download it with one click to keep, sync to a device, or add to your own library.

ElevenLabs and Speechify are paid text-to-speech and audiobook services: ElevenLabs meters you by characters with plans starting around 5 dollars per month, and Speechify Premium is about 139 dollars per year, both processing your text on their servers. Audible sells professionally recorded audiobooks by subscription, around 15 dollars per month. This tool is different in three ways: it is free with no limits, it runs entirely on your device so your text stays private, and it works on any text you paste rather than a fixed catalog. The tradeoff is that Kokoro is a compact open model, so studio narration and multilingual coverage from paid services can still sound more polished.

There are nearly thirty voices, all English-style, spanning American and British accents in both female and male options. The default is Heart, an American female voice tuned for the best overall quality. You can switch voices from the dropdown before generating, and if a particular voice fails to load for any reason, the tool automatically falls back to Heart and continues so a single bad voice never blocks the whole audiobook.

Once the Kokoro model has been downloaded and cached, narration runs without an internet connection because everything happens on-device. It also works on mobile browsers that support WebAssembly, though phones and tablets are slower than a laptop or desktop, and the first 300MB download uses mobile data. For the smoothest experience, load the model once over Wi-Fi on a device with a bit of memory to spare, then generate audiobooks freely afterward.

The first generation includes the one-time model download and the initialization of the WebAssembly runtime. After the roughly 300MB of weights are cached in your browser and the model is warmed up, later audiobooks skip the download entirely and start narrating immediately. Overall speed still depends on your device CPU and on how much text you paste, since the model runs locally on WebAssembly rather than on a remote GPU in the cloud.

No installation is needed. It is a pure web tool that runs in any modern browser. The only thing that downloads is the Kokoro model itself, which kokoro-js fetches from the Hugging Face Hub on first use and caches in your browser. There is no extension, no desktop app, and no Python or Node environment to set up.

Kokoro is released under the Apache 2.0 license, a permissive open-source license, and the audio it generates is not restricted by the tool itself. As always, make sure you have the rights to the underlying text you are narrating, since converting copyrighted material to audio does not grant you distribution rights to that content. For your own writing, notes, or public-domain and openly licensed text, you are free to keep, share, or publish the resulting MP3.

Kokoro produces natural, clearly intelligible narration that is well suited to personal listening, article-to-audio, study material, and accessibility. For a compact 82 million parameter model running in the browser, the quality is strong and it reads long prose smoothly. For a commercial, professionally produced audiobook you would still typically use a studio recording or a top-tier paid voice, but for turning your own reading list into audio on demand, at no cost and with full privacy, it is more than capable.

Built-in read-aloud features narrate on the fly and usually cannot export a file, so you cannot easily save, share, or sync the audio. This tool produces a single downloadable MP3 you own, splits long text cleanly on sentence boundaries for smoother pacing, and uses the Kokoro neural voice which generally sounds more natural than the classic system speech engines. It also keeps everything in the browser with no account, so it works the same across devices without platform lock-in.