Text to Talk

My wife's throat gave out and she couldn't talk without a lot of pain. We were in the car on a long trip and she kept downloading text-to-speech apps. They all sucked.

So at a stop I talked to Claude, explained the situation, and it built a v1 that was better than anything she had downloaded. We had so much fun playing with it and “talking” to each other the rest of the ride.

React Native and Expo, speaking through Apple's built-in speech synthesizer. That is the same engine behind VoiceOver, it runs entirely on the device, and it costs nothing per sentence. With one of Apple's downloadable premium voices it sounds close to a person.

There is also an optional neural voice, Kokoro, running on-device through ExecuTorch. It is off by default and downloads once. If it fails or lags, the app falls back to the Apple voice mid-sentence, because an app someone depends on to communicate should never go silent to protect a feature.

Nothing she types leaves the phone. There is no server, no account, and no analytics. That is a privacy stance, and it is also just the shortest path to something that works on a plane.

I want to get this in front of non-verbal people, so they can type and talk to the people around them without fighting the app first. The other options I found are kind of buns.