TalkToMeBaby

A free VS Code extension  ·  GPL-3.0-or-later  ·  Source on GitHub

Hear your draft, word by word, where you wrote it.

TalkToMeBaby reads prose files aloud inside VS Code. Markdown, txt, rst, org, tex, adoc. A Reader panel opens beside your file. The sentence being read gets a band. The word being spoken lights up. Click any word to jump there.

Install from Marketplace ext install rishmadaan.talktomebaby
field-notes.md · notes
field-notes.md
1# Field notes, Tuesday
2
3The tide tables were wrong again. We rowed out at six
4anyway, because the light was good and nobody wanted
5to say so. By the time the fog lifted, the island had
6moved. Or we had. Marta checked the compass twice and
7put it away without a word.
8
9## What we found
10
11Nothing, at first. Then the gulls.
12
13- Two oars, one of them ours
14- A tin of matches, dry
15- Footprints that stopped
Reader: field-notes.md

Field notes, Tuesday

The tide tables were wrong again. We rowed out at six anyway, because the light was good and nobody wanted to say so. By the time the fog lifted, the island had moved. Or we had. Marta checked the compass twice and put it away without a word.

Click a word to jump playback there.
Sentence 3 / 31
TalkToMeBaby · Sentence 3 / 31 · 1.25× Ln 7, Col 29Markdown
This is a recreation in HTML, not a screenshot. The band follows the sentence in both panes; the word sweep runs on top. Click a word in the Reader, or change the speed, and watch the status bar follow.
Reading

Built so you always know where the voice is.

  • Sentence band, word sweep

    A band sits behind the sentence being read. The sweep moves across the words on top of it, one at a time. The same band appears in the source editor.

  • Jump by clicking

    Click any word in the Reader and playback moves there. From the source editor, press alt+j to jump to wherever your cursor is.

  • Speed from 0.5× to 2×

    Pitch stays put. Speed is applied locally, so changing it never re-synthesises audio. Presets for the common steps, a fine slider for the rest. Your setting is remembered.

  • A cache that saves credits

    Audio is kept on disk, 200 MB by default. Reading a file a second time costs no extra API credits.

Voices

Offline on macOS. Premium voices with your own key.

WhereVoiceWhat leaves your machine
macOSThe system say voice. The default. No setup.Nothing. Fully offline.
Windows, LinuxA free online voice, ready out of the box. No API key. Unofficial: use at your own risk.The text being read is sent to an online speech service. See the disclaimer.
OptionalElevenLabs, OpenAI, or Sarvam AI for Indian languages. You bring your own key. Keys live in VS Code's secret storage.The text being read is sent to that provider.

Independent project. Not affiliated with Speechify.

Free software. All of it.

GPL-3.0-or-later

Every release ships with its full source and its license notices. You can read it, change it, run your changed copy, and pass it on under the same terms.

Contributions are welcome. Open an issue first if the change is large, so nobody builds the same thing twice.

What the repository holds

  • The VS Code extension (this page)
  • The shared speech engine the extension is built on
  • A terminal CLI that reads your AI coding agent's replies aloud
Install

Two ways in. Both free.

  • Press ⌘P on macOS or CtrlP on Windows and Linux, paste the command, press Enter.
  • Open a Markdown or text file and run TalkToMeBaby: Read Document from the Command Palette.
ext install rishmadaan.talktomebaby
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