I built a local screen reader that reads your screen aloud — no cloud, no API keys

I got tired of switching between reading and listening, so I built sttts — a local pipeline that watches any region of your screen, OCRs it, and speaks it aloud in real time. Everything runs on your own machine.

Demo

What it does

1. 🖱️ You draw a rectangle on any part of your screen


2. 📸 It snapshots that region every N seconds


3. 🔍 Pixel diff check — skips frames where nothing changed


4. 🧠 LightOnOCR-2-1B reads the text (runs on AMD GPU via ROCm)


5. 🗣️ Kokoro-82M speaks it through your speakers (runs on CPU)
   

🖥️ screen → 🔍 diff → 🧠 OCR → ✨ clean text → 🗣️ TTS → 🔊 speaker

The killer feature — auto page-turn

You can draw a second rectangle over any button on screen. After TTS finishes speaking and the screen stays idle, sttts automatically clicks it. I use this with Kindle for PC — it reads the entire book hands-free, turning pages automatically.

# Draw OCR region, then draw the next-page button

uv run python capture.py --next-btn -i 2

Models used

• 
  OCR: LightOnOCR-2-1B — fast, accurate, runs on AMD GPU via ROCm


• 
  TTS: Kokoro-82M — high quality, ~100ms latency on CPU

Both download automatically from HuggingFace on first run. No API keys, no subscriptions.

Smart idle detection

Pixel-level diff comparison means OCR and TTS only fire when something actually changed. Reading a static page? Silent. New content loaded? Speaks immediately.

# Only trigger OCR when >1% of pixels changed

uv run python capture.py --diff-threshold 1.0

Quick start

# Install system deps

sudo apt-get install -y slop xdotool libportaudio2 libsndfile1



# Install uv

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh



# Clone and run

git clone https://github.com/paradisecy/sttts

cd sttts

uv sync

uv run python capture.py

Use cases

• 📖 Hands-free ebook reading (Kindle, epub readers, PDFs)


• 📊 Financial dashboards spoken aloud as they update


• ♿ Accessibility tool for any app that lacks screen reader support


• 💻 Read terminal output or logs aloud while working


• 🌐 Listen to any webpage without a browser extension

Tech stack

• Python 3.13


• PyTorch 2.8 + ROCm 6.3 (AMD GPU)


• 
  mss for fast screen capture


• 
  transformers for OCR


• 
  kokoro for TTS


• 
  sounddevice for audio playback


• 
  slop + xdotool for region selection and mouse clicks

⭐ GitHub: paradisecy/sttts