Hearcast reads the web for you. Paste a link, drop a PDF or paste your own text, and playback starts while the words stay on screen.
What it takes
- A link: the article is extracted cleanly, code blocks included
- A PDF: read page by page, with your place kept
- An X post or a YouTube video: the content is pulled in, then read
- An audio file or pasted text: transcribed, or read as-is
- Built-in samples: two articles are ready to try without pasting anything
While it reads
- The words stay on screen and playback position is followed
- The browser voice is free, a cloud voice is available
- Adjustable reading speed, light or dark theme following the system
Around the reading
- Summary of the article
- Translation into the language you pick
- Questions to the article to dig into a point
- Queue to line up several reads
Tech stack
A TanStack Start application with React 19, Vite and TypeScript, styled with Tailwind v4. Article extraction relies on Readability and jsdom, PDFs on pdf.js. Audio is generated server-side and streamed to the browser as it is produced.