Polyvoice
One extension, every voice ~~provider~~. Select text in VS Code, press a key, hear it read aloud — through your operating system's built-in TTS or your favorite cloud voice.
Polyvoice lets you read code, Markdown, comments, or any selected text aloud from inside VS Code, and switch between five TTS providers without changing extensions:
| Provider |
What it gives you |
| Native OS TTS |
Free, offline, instant. The default on first install. |
| OpenAI |
gpt-4o-mini-tts — ~$0.015 / minute, 13 voices, 50+ languages. |
| ElevenLabs |
Highest quality. Flash v2.5 streams in ~75 ms. |
| Azure AI Foundry |
400+ neural voices, 140+ languages. |
| xAI Grok TTS |
5 expressive voices, $4.20 / 1 M chars. |
Bring your own API key for the cloud providers — Polyvoice never proxies your text through anyone else's server.
Install
Marketplace: search Polyvoice (or install dorofino.polyvoice).
Use
- Select some text.
- Press
Ctrl+Alt+S (Windows / Linux) or ⌘⌥S (macOS) — or right-click → Polyvoice: Speak Selection.
That's it. The default is your OS voice, no setup.
Switching providers
Click the Polyvoice item in the status bar, or run Polyvoice: Select Provider from the command palette. The first time you pick a cloud provider, Polyvoice asks for an API key and stores it in VS Code's encrypted SecretStorage — never in your settings file.
Commands
| Command |
Default keybinding |
| Polyvoice: Speak Selection |
Ctrl+Alt+S / ⌘⌥S |
| Polyvoice: Speak Whole Document |
— |
| Polyvoice: Stop |
Ctrl+Alt+X / ⌘⌥X |
| Polyvoice: Pause / Resume |
Ctrl+Alt+P / ⌘⌥P |
| Polyvoice: Select Provider |
— |
| Polyvoice: Select Voice |
— |
| Polyvoice: Set API Key for Provider |
— |
| Polyvoice: Export Selection to Audio File |
— |
| Polyvoice: Clear Audio Cache |
— |
Markdown smarts
When reading a .md file, Polyvoice skips fenced code blocks by default. Toggle this in polyvoice.markdown.skipCodeBlocks.
Per-language voice map
Map locales to specific provider+voice pairs:
"polyvoice.languageMap": {
"es": "elevenlabs:21m00Tcm4TlvDq8ikWAM",
"ja": "azure:ja-JP-NanamiNeural"
}
Caching
Identical selections aren't re-billed. Audio is cached on disk under your VS Code global storage, LRU-evicted at polyvoice.cache.maxMB (default 200 MB). Clear it any time with Polyvoice: Clear Audio Cache.
Privacy
- Zero telemetry.
- Selected text is sent only to the provider you've chosen, using your API key.
- API keys live in VS Code
SecretStorage. They are not written to settings.json and not synced.
Build from source
git clone https://github.com/dorofino/polyvoice.git
cd polyvoice
npm install
npm run build
# Press F5 in VS Code to launch an Extension Development Host.
License
MIT — see LICENSE.
Architecture
See docs/ADR-001-architecture.md.
