Wielojęzyczny tekst na mowę, offline: 31 języków na urządzeniu

It helps to know what "runs on your device" actually means, because it is the whole reason this combination is rare.

A cloud read-aloud service keeps its voices on computers it owns. To hear your paragraph, the service needs your paragraph: the text travels over the internet, becomes sound somewhere else, and the audio comes back. That design makes many languages easy for a company, because it installs the voices once, in one place, and everyone shares them.

An on-device tool works the other way around. The voice is installed on your own laptop and the sound is produced there. That means four practical things. Your text stays with you, so there is nothing to leak or accidentally train on. It keeps working with the internet off, on a train or a plane or bad hotel wifi. It does not change character overnight because a company retuned its service. And it costs nothing extra per use.

The catch, until recently, was size. Getting many languages to sound natural from a program small enough to sit quietly on a normal laptop was hard, so most private readers shipped English and stopped there. That is the limit Yaps has now moved.

Here is the full set, grouped so you can scan it rather than read a list of thirty-one items in a row. Every one of these runs offline on desktop.

Western Europe. English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese.

Nordic and Baltic. Danish, Finnish, Swedish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian.

Central and Eastern Europe. Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Slovenian, Greek, Russian, Ukrainian.

Asia. Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Indonesian, Vietnamese.

Middle East and Turkey. Arabic, Turkish.

Two things are worth saying plainly about that list. It covers the languages of most of Europe, which is where the gap has been most annoying, and it includes several languages that private tools almost never voice at all: Estonian, Slovenian, Lithuanian, Croatian, Bulgarian. If you work in one of those, you have probably never had a read-aloud option that did not involve uploading your text.

Is this the same as the languages Yaps takes dictation in? No, and it is worth keeping the two apart. Dictation, where you speak and Yaps types, covers about 25 languages and detects which one you are speaking automatically. Read-aloud, where Yaps speaks text back to you, covers the 31 languages above. They are different features built on different foundations, so the two numbers do not merge into one figure. A language being in one list does not put it in the other.

A contract in a second language is still a contract. It should not have to be uploaded to a stranger's server just so you can hear it read.

Yaps

Setup takes about three minutes once. After that, hearing a passage in any of the 31 languages is a single keypress.

1. Install Yaps on desktop

Get Yaps for Windows, macOS, or Linux and open it. The desktop app begins with a 7-day free trial, and starting the trial does need an account. Signing in does not move the reading to the cloud: the voice sits on your machine and the sound is produced there.

Yaps is deliberately small. It starts in under a second and sits quietly in the background, so a reader waiting for your next selection does not get in the way of your other work.

2. Choose a reading voice for your language

Open the read-aloud settings and pick the voice for the language you want to hear. This is the one deliberate step in the whole process, and it is worth doing properly: the voice you select is what decides how the text is pronounced.

Along with the 31 offline languages, Yaps also ships additional English voices and optional cloud voices for people who want a different sound while they are online. For the private, works-anywhere setup this guide is about, stay with an offline voice.

3. Select the text in any app

Highlight whatever you want to hear. A paragraph in a browser, a clause in a PDF, a line in an email, a message in a chat window, a note in Yaps itself. Yaps reads a selection from any app on the system, so there is no dedicated reader window to paste things into and no separate app to open.

To take a full page, use Command+A on macOS or Ctrl+A on Windows and Linux.

4. Press the read-aloud hotkey

With the text selected, press the Yaps read-aloud hotkey, which is Option and Fn together on desktop. Yaps speaks the passage in the voice you chose. Press it again to stop.

Nothing about this step touches the network. You can switch the wifi off first and it works identically, which is the simplest way to prove to yourself that the text is not going anywhere.

5. Read a long document hands-free

A paragraph is one keypress. A chapter is better handled as a note. Paste the text into a Yaps note and start read-aloud from there, and Yaps reads the whole thing straight through while you cook, walk, or rest your eyes.

This is also the tidiest way to work through source material in a second language. You get the whole argument in your ears once, and you can go back to the page for the parts that mattered.

6. Save the reading as an audio file

Turn on the setting to save reading audio, and the reading becomes a file instead of a moment. Yaps writes it out as a WAV audio file that belongs to you: copy it to a phone, drop it in a music player, keep it in a folder with the document it came from.

That changes what read-aloud is for. A set of readings becomes a listening queue for the commute, and a brief in Spanish becomes something you hear twice on the walk to work. If turning documents into listening is the actual goal, there is more in the guide to making an audiobook out of a PDF.

Multilingual read-aloud sounds like a niche until you notice how many ordinary situations need it.

You are reading something binding in a second language. A lease, a supplier contract, an insurance letter, a tax notice. You read carefully, and you still want a second pass with your ears, because hearing a clause read plainly catches the sentence you skimmed. This is exactly the text you should not paste into a web service. The same logic runs through the guide to reading a PDF aloud privately.

You are studying from sources in another language. Students and researchers routinely work through material in French, German, Russian, or Japanese. Hearing a dense passage read out is a genuinely different pass over the same words, and a stack of readings turns into audio for the walk to campus. If your reading list is long, academic writing and reading workflows is the wider version of this.

You translate, or you check translations. Reading a target-language draft by ear is an old proofreading trick that works because your eyes forgive what your ears will not: the clumsy rhythm, the word that repeats, the clause that runs on. Yaps reads what is written, exactly as written, in the language it is written in. That is the point. The general technique is in the guide to proofreading with text-to-speech.

You are learning a language. Hearing text pronounced is one of the most useful things you can do with a page of it, and per-word cloud pricing makes people ration exactly the behaviour they should be repeating. On-device reading is unmetered, so you can hear the same paragraph six times without a second thought.

Your household runs in two languages. Reading with a child in one language and a partner in another, or reading a school letter in the language it arrived in, is a normal weekday. A reader that only ever speaks English covers half the house. And anyone whose eyes are simply tired gets the same benefit in whichever language they happen to be reading.

Your computer already has some way of speaking text, and the web is full of readers. Both have a place. Here is an honest comparison for reading text aloud in a language that is not English.

The built-in voices on macOS and Windows deserve credit. Both systems let you install extra language voices that run locally, and for a quick listen they are free and already there. The friction is in the details: coverage depends on what you installed, reading a specific selection is inconsistent from app to app, and saving the result as a file is usually not on offer.

Cloud readers keep one honest advantage, and it is a narrow one: total language count. If you need a language outside the 31, or you want translation and reading in a single action, a web service is the right tool for that job. That is a fair trade for a public article and a poor one for a contract, a medical letter, or an unpublished draft.

Being clear about the edges is more useful than a longer list of wins.

It does not translate. Yaps reads the text that is in front of it, in the language it is written in. If you have an English document and you want to hear it in Italian, you need a translation first, and then Yaps will read the Italian. Reading and translating are separate jobs, and this workflow is the reading one.

A sentence that switches language mid-way is the hard case. Real writing does this constantly: an English paragraph with a French phrase in it, a German sentence quoting an English product name. The voice reads with the pronunciation rules of the language you chose, so the borrowed words come out accented. Proper nouns, brand names, and place names are the usual casualties. If a passage is genuinely mixed, split it and read each part with the matching voice.

It cannot read a scan. Yaps has no OCR, which is the technology that turns a photograph of a page back into real letters. A scanned, image-only PDF holds a picture of words, not words, so nothing highlights when you drag across it. Make the file searchable first with Preview on macOS or Acrobat on Windows, and then it reads like any other document.

There is no iPhone or iPad app yet. Yaps ships on Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux, and iOS is coming soon. The 31-language offline read-aloud described here is the desktop feature, on Windows, macOS, and Linux. If you specifically need multilingual reading on an iPhone today, use the built-in iOS voices, and note that a WAV file saved from Yaps on desktop plays perfectly well on any phone.

Yaps on Android is free and needs no account: voice typing in any app, voice notes with local search, and read-aloud.

The 31-language offline read-aloud in this guide is a desktop feature, on Windows, macOS, and Linux. There is no free tier on desktop: it starts with a 7-day free trial, which does need an account, and then costs $15 a month on Pro, or $12 a month billed annually. Pro also covers unlimited dictation and read-aloud, unlimited transcription of audio and video files you already have, unlimited captioning with SRT export, chat with your own notes answered on your device, the Studio editor, voice commands, and vault sync between your phone and your desktop. Max at $25 a month adds premium cloud credits and voice cloning.

The point of the flat price is that nothing about your reading is metered. Read a whole book aloud in Polish twice. It costs the same as reading one paragraph.

Multilingual read-aloud that runs offline used to be a contradiction. It is not one any more. Install Yaps on Windows, macOS, or Linux, pick the voice for your language, select any text on the system, and press Option and Fn. Yaps speaks it in one of 31 languages, produced on your own machine, and can save the reading as a WAV file you keep.

Make Yaps the default when the text is yours to protect and the language is not English: contracts, casework, source material, drafts, letters from home. Go to a cloud reader only for the specific edges, when you need a language outside the 31 or you want translation and reading in a single step, and only when the document is public enough that uploading it costs you nothing. If offline is the theme you keep running into, we keep a broader list of private tools that run on your own device.

Is there a text to speech app that works offline in other languages?

Yes. Yaps reads text aloud in 31 languages on desktop with the voice running entirely on your own machine, so it works with the internet switched off and nothing is uploaded. That combination is unusual: most private readers cover English only, and most readers with wide language coverage are web services that need your text on their servers first.

What languages can Yaps read aloud?

Yaps reads aloud in 31 languages offline on desktop: English, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Hindi, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. Every one of those is produced on your device rather than in the cloud. Dictation, which is the reverse feature, covers about 25 languages and is a separate list.

Does Yaps read text aloud in Spanish?

Yes. Spanish is one of the 31 offline read-aloud languages on desktop, so you can select Spanish text in any app, press the read-aloud hotkey, and hear it spoken with no internet connection and no upload. The same applies to French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch. Pick the matching voice in the read-aloud settings first, because that is what sets the pronunciation.

Can I read German text aloud offline on my laptop?

Yes. German is included in the 31-language offline set, so Yaps speaks German text on Windows, macOS, or Linux with the wifi off and nothing sent anywhere. This is the practical case for anyone dealing with German contracts, invoices, or official letters that they would rather not paste into a web tool. Select the passage, press Option and Fn, and it reads.

Does offline text to speech really work with no internet at all?

Yes, when you are using one of the offline voices. The voice is installed on your computer and the sound is produced there, so the network is not involved at any point in the reading. The simplest way to confirm it for yourself is to turn the wifi off and read a paragraph: the behaviour does not change. Yaps also offers optional cloud voices for people who want a different sound while online, and those do need a connection.

How do I save a reading as an audio file?

Turn on the setting to save reading audio in Yaps on desktop, and each reading is written out as a WAV audio file you keep. From there you can copy it to a phone, add it to a music player, or store it next to the original document. Yaps Studio also exports WAV audio and SRT subtitles, so the audio side of your workflow ends in real files rather than a stream you cannot keep.

Do I have to upload my text to get multilingual read-aloud?

No. That used to be the only option, and it is what makes multilingual reading awkward for sensitive material. With Yaps the text stays on your machine for all 31 languages, so a contract, a patient letter, a legal brief, or an unpublished draft can be read aloud without ever becoming an upload.

Does Yaps translate text before reading it aloud?

No. Yaps reads the text exactly as written, in the language it is written in, and does not translate it. If you have an English document and you want to hear it in Japanese, you need to translate the text first and then have Yaps read the Japanese. Some cloud readers do combine translation with reading, which is a genuine reason to use one for that specific job.

What happens if a sentence mixes two languages?

Yaps reads the whole sentence with the pronunciation rules of the voice you selected, so an English name inside a Polish sentence, or a French phrase inside an English paragraph, comes out accented. Mixed-language sentences are the hard case, and it is worth being honest about that. Proper nouns and brand names are the most common casualties. If a passage is properly bilingual, split it and read each part with the matching voice.

How many languages does Yaps dictation support, and is that the same list?

Dictation covers about 25 languages, detected automatically from your speech, and read-aloud covers 31 languages. They are two different features with two different sets of languages, so the numbers do not combine and one list does not imply the other. If a specific language matters to you for both speaking and listening, check it against each list separately.

Is multilingual text to speech free?

Yaps on Android is free and needs no account, and it includes read-aloud. The 31-language offline coverage described here is a desktop feature, and desktop has no free tier: it starts with a 7-day free trial, which does need an account, then $15 a month on Pro or $12 a month billed annually. The built-in voices on macOS and Windows are free too, though coverage depends on what you install and saving the reading as a file is usually not on offer.

Can I read a PDF aloud in another language?

Yes, as long as the PDF has real selectable text, which most exported documents do. Open it in any viewer, drag to highlight the passage, and press the read-aloud hotkey to hear it in the matching language. A scanned PDF is a picture of a page and has to be made searchable first, because Yaps does not do OCR. There is a fuller walkthrough in the guide to reading a PDF aloud privately.

Does multilingual read-aloud work on iPhone?

Not yet. Yaps ships on Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux, and the iPhone and iPad version is coming soon, so the 31-language offline read-aloud is a desktop feature today. In the meantime, the built-in iOS voices cover many languages, and a WAV file you save from Yaps on desktop plays on any phone without an app.

What is the best offline text to speech app for language learning?

Yaps is the strongest option if you want to hear text pronounced without paying per word, because the reading happens on your machine and is not metered, so repeating the same paragraph ten times costs nothing. It covers 31 languages offline on desktop and can save each reading as an audio file for later listening. It does not translate and it will not pronounce every unusual proper noun correctly, so pair it with a dictionary for the words that matter most.