Tolle Lege — take it up and hear it

Doc'Aloud

Turn any document into a spoken summary. On your own machine, with an AI you control, and nothing hosted by anyone else.

Pay what you want — including nothing.

Be the first to review it

Honest about small amounts: a payment of €1 is almost entirely eaten by the fixed fees Gumroad and the card processor charge per transaction — roughly €0.90 of it, leaving small change for me. From about €3 up, most of what you pay actually arrives. Below that, take it for free instead. That is a real option, not a polite gesture.

The same job

Google charges a subscription for this

Google Docs Audio Summaries

$19.99

per month — about $240 a year, every year

  • Your document goes to Google
  • Stops working when you stop paying
  • No control over the length

Doc’Aloud

Once, or nothing

no subscription, no account, no upsell

  • Runs a local model — nothing leaves your machine
  • Yours after you download it
  • Tell it “5 minutes” and it fits

Why it is different

Built for people who would rather not upload their documents

Private by design

Run a local model through Ollama and nothing leaves your machine — no cloud, no quota, no tracking. Prefer a cloud model? Bring your own key; it lives in the Windows credential vault, never in our files.

Target time

Tell it five minutes and the summary is sized to fit under it — something the big players do not give you.

Faithful across languages

Summarize an English report into Dutch, French or German and the figures, names and technical terms stay right. It does not turn jargon into nonsense.

Read aloud, verbatim

For a recipe or a manual, skip the summary entirely and have it read the document itself, word for word.

Voices included

A natural English and a Flemish/Dutch voice ship with it and run locally. Other languages download on first use.

Save as MP3

Listen in the app, or export the audio and take it with you on the commute.

How it works

Three steps

  1. Pick a document — PDF, DOCX, Markdown, TXT, or just paste text.
  2. Choose a length and a voice — Short, Normal, Deep, or a target time.
  3. Listen, or save an MP3. The speech engine runs locally, so no key is needed for the voice.

Honest about your data

With a cloud provider, the text you summarize is sent to that provider to be summarized. Google’s free Gemini tier may use it to improve their products; a paid key does not.

With a local model, or with the Read aloud button, nothing leaves your machine at all. We do not run a server, collect data, or track anything.

Questions

Before you download

Is it really free?

Yes — pay what you want, including nothing. You bring your own AI key (free tiers exist) or run a model locally.

What do I need?

Windows 10 or 11, and an AI to do the summarizing: Google Gemini (free tier, no card needed), a local model via Ollama (unlimited, fully offline), or an OpenAI/Claude key you already have.

Does it work offline?

The voice always does. Summarizing needs an AI: a local model is fully offline, cloud models need internet.

Which files work?

.txt, .md, .docx and .pdf — or paste text directly. Scanned PDFs are images with no selectable text, so export those to text first.

How big is the download?

About 307 MB. It bundles the speech engine, two voices and everything else it needs, so there is nothing further to install.

Take it up and hear it.

Free, local, privacy-first. No tracking, no ads, made in the EU.