TL;DR: SpeakRate is a small macOS menu bar app that reads your selected text aloud and lets you speed it up or slow it down while it's speaking. Since v1.1.0 it can also skip URLs, file paths and code so you don't have to listen to them. MIT-licensed, no ads, no tracking. brew install augustose/tap/speakrate

macOS has a built-in "speak selection" feature (⌥Escape), and it's genuinely useful. But it has one limitation that drove me to build my own: the speaking rate is buried in System Settings, and changing it doesn't affect text that's already being read. When a passage is slow, you sit through it; when it's too fast, you start over.

SpeakRate is my answer: a menu bar app with its own speech engine (AVSpeechSynthesizer), so the rate is under its control. Select text anywhere, press ⌥⌘R, and adjust with ⌥⌘→ / ⌥⌘← — the change applies mid-sentence, picking up from the word being spoken. It also detects the language of the selection (English, Spanish, French, and whatever voices you have installed) and picks a matching voice.

Skipping the unpronounceable

The feature I use most came from listening to my own technical notes. A synthesizer will happily spell out https://github.com/augustose/homebrew-tap character by character, and a paragraph with two URLs and a file path becomes thirty seconds of noise.

Since v1.1.0 there's a Skip Technical Text toggle in the menu. When it's on, URLs become "link", file paths become "file" or "directory", inline code and long hashes become "code", and decorative symbol runs (-->, ###) are dropped. The placeholders are localized, so a Spanish text says "enlace" instead. The sentence keeps its shape; you just don't listen to the plumbing. It's off by default — sometimes you do want to hear the URL.

Honest fine print

  • Apple Silicon only (M1 and later), macOS 13+.
  • Not notarized by Apple — Gatekeeper will ask you to allow it on first launch. The README explains the two-click fix.
  • It needs the Accessibility permission, because it reads your selection by sending ⌘C to the frontmost app (and then restores your clipboard).

Install

TERMINAL 
brew trust augustose/tap
brew install augustose/tap/speakrate

Or grab the zip from the latest release. Full details, shortcuts and source code in the GitHub repo.

SpeakRate is MIT-licensed and free — made with love, for everyone, because good tools should just exist. If it saves you from listening to one spelled-out URL, it did its job. Found a bug or want a feature? Open an issue on GitHub.