Our Story

About ClintReads

A decade of listening, distilled into one little tray icon.

How it all started

Less of a business plan, more of a personal grudge.

ClintReads didn't start as a product. It started as a frustration. For over a decade I've leaned on screen readers - not because I have to, but because I'd genuinely rather listen. Somewhere along the way I absorbed enough articles, PDFs and email threads by ear to have, conservatively:

Listened to the internet's entire backlog of "long reads"… twice
Developed strong, unsolicited opinions about which voices sound like a satnav
Rested my eyes through approximately 9,000 dense documents
Actually finished the reports everyone else skims (this one's real)

The problem? Almost every great screen reader is built for accessibility first - and rightly so. But that means they take over your whole computer, narrate every button, menu and dialog, and generally make the machine hard to use for anyone who can see the screen just fine and only wants the words read aloud.

I missed the old IVONA MiniReader: highlight text, press a key, hear it. Simple. When it quietly faded away, nothing really replaced it. So I built the thing I actually wanted - a tiny reader that reads whatever you highlight, in a genuinely natural voice, and then gets out of the way. That's ClintReads. Life's too short to not finish the article.

Meet the maker

The person who decided this was a good idea.

Clinton Browne

Maker & Former CTO / CIO

(Yes, that's 30 years in IT. No, he doesn't look it. Yes, he's been coding since before the internet was a thing.)

ClintReads is built by one person: Clinton Browne. With 30 years in IT - from Engineer all the way up to CTO/CIO - Clinton has basically watched the entire evolution of modern computing happen in real time. (Ask him about debugging over a 56k modem. Go on, we dare you.)

His career reads like a tech-industry CV that wouldn't fit on one page: a leading open-source and full-stack Microsoft developer, then CTO of an established FinTech, then CIO of a mobile-first challenger bank (before Paysafe). His expertise spans Cloud, Web and Mobile, the Microsoft stack, and enterprise & architectural design - with a soft spot for best practices, process improvement and Agile/DevOps.

And because shipping software and running organisations apparently wasn't enough, he also holds an MBA (Technology Management) from The Open University, alongside a stack of letters: BSc (BIT), BTech (Hons), ITIL Expert, MCSD & MCP, and AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner. That's enough certifications to wallpaper a small office. Twice.

But the qualification that actually matters here isn't on any certificate: Clinton has spent 10+ years relying on screen readers every single day, so he knew exactly what was missing - and exactly how annoying the alternatives could be. (Yes, he's the one who insisted on the offline neural voices. And the dark mode. You're welcome.)

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Our Mission

Make listening a first-class way to read

The best tool is the one you forget is even there. ClintReads does exactly one thing - reads what you highlight - and tries to do it beautifully, then disappears. Brilliant for accessibility, absolutely; but built for anyone who simply takes more in by ear.

We also believe good software shouldn't hijack your clipboard, take over your screen, or quietly phone home. So it doesn't. It's free to use, runs offline, and asks for nothing but the occasional coffee.

Fun facts (that may or may not be true)

FACT #1

ClintReads has read aloud enough text to narrate the collected works of several authors who'd probably prefer the royalties.

FACT #2

The built-in neural engine is called Kokoro, runs entirely offline, and has never once judged your reading list.

FACT #3

On an NVIDIA GPU it generates speech roughly 8× faster than real time - about 8× faster than you can feel guilty about your unread tabs.

FACT #4

The whole app lives in your system tray and flat-out refuses to appear in Alt-Tab. It's shy like that.

Ready to listen?

Highlight something. Press a key. Hear it.

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