Quickstart

In a terminal:

bard

which defaults to:

bard --backend openai --voice alloy --model gpt-4o-mini-tts

(this assumes the environment variable OPENAI_API_KEY is defined)

An icon should show up almost immediately in the system tray, with options to copy the content of the clipboard (the last thing you copy-pasted) and send that to the AI model for reading aloud.

From here you can:

• Feed bard different input sources — see Input sources.
• Switch backend, model, or voice from the tray menu.
• Bind a global keyboard shortcut to read the clipboard from anywhere.

Terminal mode

There is a terminal version via the --no-tray parameter that renders a keyboard-driven playback dashboard ([space] play/pause, [←→] ±jump, [↑↓] track, [del] delete, [q] menu).

For a one-off execution of the program without any controls, use --no-interactive (the older --no-prompt is kept as a deprecated alias).