Bard

Bard is a text-to-speech client that integrates on the desktop. It reads plain text, clipboard content, web pages, or PDFs aloud through a system-tray player.

• Multiple input sources. Feed bard plain text, the clipboard, a URL, an HTML file, or a PDF — it extracts the readable content (with readability) and speaks it. Useful for reading paywalled articles via "View Page Source".
• Four TTS backends. OpenAI and ElevenLabs (remote, API key) plus Kokoro and Piper (local, free, offline, multilingual). Switch backend, model, and voice at runtime from the tray menu without restarting.
• Desktop player. A system-tray icon with playback controls, or a keyboard-driven terminal dashboard with --no-tray. A global shortcut can read the clipboard from anywhere (works on Wayland too).
• Batch or interactive. Pass -o file.mp3 to synthesise straight to an audio file and exit, or run interactively and drive playback from the tray.

Get started

pip install bard-cli[all]
bard

• Installation — system libraries, backend extras, and the GNOME launcher.
• Quickstart — your first reading from the clipboard.
• Backends & voices — OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Kokoro, Piper.
• Tray menu — switch backend, model, and voice at runtime.

Guides

• Input sources — text, clipboard, URLs, HTML, PDF, audio files.
• Batch render to a file — synthesise audio without the player.
• Backends & voices — installing local models, listing and picking voices.
• Tray menu
• Global keyboard shortcut — drive bard from anywhere via signals.
• Fine-tuning — chunk size and request length.
• Player
• Android — running bard under Termux.

From the same author

A few other open-source tools I maintain.

Scientific writing & data

• texmark — write scientific articles in Markdown and convert them to journal-ready LaTeX/PDF.
• papers — command-line BibTeX bibliography and PDF library manager.
• datamanifest — declarative, reproducible dataset management. (See also the datamanifest.toml format spec and the DataManifest.jl Julia port.)

Speech to Text (dictate) and Text to Speech (read-aloud) tools

• scribe — speech-to-text dictation.