A reading companion that started for one person, in one kitchen, and turned into something for the rest of us.
I built the first version of HearFlow over a couple of weekends in 2026, because my sister was running out of eyes.
She's in the IB program — the kind of curriculum that asks you to read more than is humanly comfortable. By spring of her first year, she was getting headaches from late-night reading and waking up too tired to keep up. I'd watched her highlight a chapter, sigh, close the laptop, and walk away for the night because her eyes just couldn't anymore.
I went looking for a tool that would read whatever was on her screen, in a voice that didn't sound like a 2008 GPS. What I found was a stack of compromises — voices that grated, services that wanted her documents uploaded somewhere, browser extensions that worked on one page in three.
So I made HearFlow. The first version was a few hundred lines of Swift and a small floating window. She highlighted a paragraph, pressed a shortcut, and a calm voice read it back to her. She used it the next morning to get through a chapter while she made coffee. The morning after that, she sent me three more paragraphs to fix.
A few months later I was using it more than she was. Not because I had as much to read, but because I'd noticed the small thing she'd been telling me about: reading with your ears is different from reading with your eyes. It gives you the same content somewhere else in your day — on a walk, while you cook, in the chair you sat down in after closing a screen.
It turns out a lot of people have a reading pile they never quite get to. I had one too. HearFlow is the version of that idea I'm finally willing to share. It's still in early access — still learning what you need it to do — but it's good enough to be useful, and you can help shape what it becomes.
Thanks for reading. I hope you'll let HearFlow read the next thing for you.
Reading with your ears is different from reading with your eyes.
Software should make space for the work, not fight you for attention. HearFlow stays out of the way until you call on it, and goes quiet the moment you do.
The best reads don't feel like processing text. They feel like a calm conversation — one that fits into the rest of your day, in a chair, on a walk, in the kitchen.
A research paper doesn't sound like a Slack thread doesn't sound like a chapter of a novel. The same voice, in the right rhythm, for what you're actually reading.
The difference between hearing a name correctly and hearing it mangled is the difference between feeling read to and feeling tolerated. We work on this every week.
Your highlights are yours. We don't keep them, we don't sell them, we don't build a profile from them. That's not a premium tier — it's the baseline.
HearFlow is built by one person, on a Mac, with a lot of help from his sister. Reach out any time at hello@hearflow.ai — every email gets a reply.