VoiceQuill turns text into narration on your Mac. The basics take a minute. The little marks below are what make a read land — a beat here, a lift there, a name said right.
No setup, no account. Everything runs on your Mac.
Drop your script into the editor. Any length.
Choose from the voice list and preview it.
Tune pitch, warmth and tone — and add the inline marks below.
Hit generate, then export as WAV or M4A.
Real examples with sample scripts — paste one in, pick the voice, and you’ve got a clip. Coral marks are the inline controls explained further down.
Teach something without ever being on camera. Clear, steady, repeatable.
Atmospheric reads for a reel. Let the silence do the work.
Long pauses turn a script into something you can breathe to.
Confident brand narration for a landing page or launch video.
Names, places, loanwords — say them exactly how you mean.
Grab attention in the first line, then cut to your content.
Type these marks right into your script. They’re how you direct the read — where it breathes, what it leans on, how a word is said. Marks are removed from the audio; only their effect remains.
Wrap text in single asterisks to lean on it — a small beat just before, plus a lift in stress. Use it on the word that carries the line. It’s a nudge, not a shout (the voice doesn’t get louder, it gets deliberate).
Wrap text in tildes to flatten it — stress is stripped, so it reads quicker and lighter. Good for throwaway asides or the quiet half of a contrast.
Drops real silence into the audio (not a guess — actual inserted quiet). Use it to let a point land or to separate two thoughts.
A longer beat for suspense, sign-offs, or breathing room. (Anything after the colon works — [pause:long], [pause:beat] — it’s all the long pause.)
Pauses add up. Put two or three in a row for a dramatic hold that’s longer than a single long pause.
The part in [ brackets ] is just a note to yourself — it isn’t spoken. The part in ( parentheses ) is what’s actually said. Spell it the way it sounds. Perfect for names, brands, and foreign words the voice would otherwise mangle.
You don’t need a mark for every breath. Commas, periods, dashes (—) and ellipses (…) already shape the pacing. Three dots ... become a single trailing-off beat. Reach for [pause] when you want more than punctuation gives.
Everything above works on every tier. Pro adds 47 voices across seven languages, on-device translation, two-voice dialogue, a pronunciation dictionary, presets, and one-click buttons for the marks — all still on your Mac.
English, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazilian), French, Italian, Japanese and Mandarin. A chip next to SPEED shows the detected language and moves native voices to the top — tap to pin it. One language per script; numbers, prices, times and dates are read correctly in each.
Write your script in any of the seven languages. One click rewrites it into another using Apple’s on-device translation — nothing is uploaded — then generate the voiceover in that language with a native voice. REVERT puts the original back. Write once, publish in seven. The language pack downloads once from Apple, then works offline.
Pick Quill and Ink from the voice list, then start each line with Quill: or Ink: (P1:/P2: also work). Generate once — VoiceQuill casts both. Works in any of the seven languages.
Save word → “say it like” pairs once and they apply to every script automatically — no re-marking the same brand or name each time. It layers on top of the inline [note](say-it) override.
Start from a shaped voice in the editor — Late Night, Morning, Deep Read, Hype, Poet — then tune from there.
The marks stay typeable on every tier, but Pro adds buttons and shortcuts:
⌘B Emphasize · ⌘⇧B Soften · ⌘P Pause · ⌘⇧P Long pause · Say as for pronunciation.Plain text works fine. A few marks make it sound like someone meant it. Here’s the same copy, both ways.
* and ~ work in pairs — one to start, one to end. Forget the closing mark and the effect runs to the end of the line.[pause] for a breath; [pause][pause] for a hold; [pause:long] for suspense.(nyawki), not (gnocchi).