How a page
finds its voice.
A few words about how Chickadee works,
and what happens when you press play.
Chickadee turns the words on a web page into speech, right on your computer. The voice comes from a small, open speech model inside your browser. Your reading stays with you.
- The pagetext from your browser
- The speech modelruns on your machine
- A voiceone sentence at a time
Your first listen.
Install Chickadee, open an article, and press ⌥ R on Mac or Alt R on Windows. You can also open the extension from your toolbar and use its read button.
Chickadee picks a speech model for your computer. If your computer can run Kokoro, the first read downloads it once, about 310 MB, so give that a little time. If not, Chickadee uses Paradee, which comes inside the extension and starts right away.
As the voice speaks, the current sentence lights up on the page. Pause, skip, or adjust the speed with the controls at the bottom. To begin partway through, right-click any sentence and choose “Read aloud from here.” You can switch the model or the voice from the extension’s toolbar button.
Two small models, close to home.
Chickadee has two speech models. Kokoro-82M is an open speech model with the most natural voice, and twelve voices to choose from. When your computer has WebGPU, a browser feature for using the graphics hardware, Chickadee runs Kokoro on it.
Paradee is a much smaller model, distilled from Kokoro. It is about 9 MB and has one voice. It runs on any computer’s processor, so it needs no WebGPU and no download. Chickadee uses Kokoro where your computer supports it and Paradee everywhere else, and you can switch between them any time. Read how Paradee was made.
It works through the page sentence by sentence, preparing the next few while the current one plays. The article stays where it is, with each spoken sentence highlighted in place. You can follow along with your eyes, or just listen.
Nothing you read is uploaded.
The extension processes page text inside your browser. There is no Chickadee speech server receiving your articles, and the extension has no analytics or tracking. It accesses a page when you ask it to read.
Paradee works offline from the start. Kokoro needs an internet connection once, for its first download. After that it is cached, and speech works offline on pages you already have open or available offline. If that cache is cleared, Kokoro will need to download again.
Your model, voice and speed preferences are saved through Chrome’s settings storage and may sync across your devices. For the details, including how this website differs from the extension, read the privacy policy.
A few things to know.
You’ll need a Chrome-based browser, such as Chrome or Edge, and that’s it. Chickadee works on any computer. It uses Kokoro when your computer has WebGPU, and Paradee when it doesn’t. Speech generation uses your computer’s resources, so performance depends on your hardware.
Start with a regular article page. Browser settings pages and other protected pages cannot be read by the extension. Offline speech also cannot open an article you haven’t loaded yet.
Chickadee is free and open source. Because your computer makes the audio, there is no per-read speech server bill, subscription, or API key. You can look through the source or report a rough edge.