Voices
Meet Ada, Rowan, Mei, and Theo.
Each Murmur voice is synthetic and tuned for one kind of reading. Press play to hear a longer passage, read just as it would be in the app.
Press play on any voice
Ada
Bright and quick
Like a friend catching you up on the walk to the station.
Ada keeps a brisk, sunny pace without ever sounding rushed. She is the voice people pick for the first coffee of the day, when there are eleven newsletters waiting and a train in nine minutes.
Good for
- Newsletters
- Morning briefings
- Getting through a backlog
Good morning, and welcome to issue 142 of Small Hours. Three things worth knowing before your coffee goes cold. First, a small library on the north coast has started lending out telescopes, and the waiting list is now longer than the one for the new crime novels. The librarians say the clear nights are booked until spring. Second, the humble paper map is having a quiet comeback.
Rowan
Warm and low
The voice for evenings, with the lamp on and nowhere to be.
Rowan sits low and unhurried, with a warmth that makes a family email thread sound like someone reading it to you across the kitchen table.
Good for
- Email from people you love
- Letters and long replies
- Late reading
Saturday at the allotment. Three messages. Nina wrote, on Thursday evening: Is everyone still coming on Saturday? Dad says the beans are finally ready, and he wants witnesses. Sam replied, an hour later: I will bring the good bread and the folding chairs. Do we need anything for the shed roof, or is that a job for next time? And Dad wrote, this morning: Bring your boots, it rained all night. The roof can wait. I have put the kettle in the shed, so we are set.
Mei
Calm and precise
Every figure lands exactly where it should.
Mei is even and exact. She gives a table of results the same patience as a paragraph, which makes her the voice for reports, papers, and anything you would otherwise print out and underline.
Good for
- Reports and PDFs
- Anything with numbers
- Studying
Summary of findings. Between April and September, 212 volunteers recorded 4,112 street trees across nine wards. Canopy cover rose from 17.2 percent to 18.9 percent since the last survey in 2021. The gain is uneven: three wards account for 71 percent of new planting, while two wards saw a small net loss. Young trees planted after 2022 had a first-summer survival rate of 86 percent where a watering volunteer was assigned, and 58 percent where none was.
Theo
Gentle storyteller
He lets a long essay breathe between the lines.
Theo reads the way a good teacher tells a story: a little slower than you expect, with room to picture things. Long essays, short fiction, and anything you saved for a quiet hour.
Good for
- Essays and long reads
- Fiction
- Winding down
Walk down an old street on a hot afternoon and you can feel a decision someone made a hundred years ago. The air is cooler under the planes. The light comes down in pieces, and moves across the pavement like water. The people who planted those trees never sat in that shade. They planted it for strangers, and for a city they would not live to see. Cities still do this, by the thousand, every winter. The reasons are less sentimental than they first appear.
About these samples: they were rendered on our own computers with Kokoro-82M, an open-weight text-to-speech model. None of them is a recording of a real person.
Pick a favourite, or one for every source.
In the app you can set a voice per newsletter, per sender, or per kind of item, and change it whenever you like.