Ukrainian Text to Speech: Free, In-Browser, Nothing Uploaded

Ukrainian gets one neural engine and no built-in offline system voice on the most common desktop OS — the honest picture, not the marketing one. Paste Ukrainian text, press play, and the audio is generated on your own device — no account, no upload, no character limit. This page is the honest version: which engines really speak Ukrainian (Українська), which ones silently do not, and what each one costs you.

Which engines actually speak Ukrainian

Quick TTS ships four TTS engines and lets you switch between them from one dropdown — but not all four cover every language, and the gaps are not the ones you would guess from the marketing.

Only one of Quick TTS's three neural engines speaks Ukrainian:

• Piper ships zero Ukrainian voices. Quick TTS does not ship a Piper Ukrainian voice in this build — the upstream catalogue does carry one, but it has not been through our per-voice intelligibility checks yet — so the engine option is hidden here rather than shown and then failing to load.
• Kokoro-82M is English-only and is hidden everywhere else, Ukrainian included.
• Supertonic HD does speak Ukrainian, natively, at 44.1kHz, as one of the 31 languages this build maps.

Web Speech is thinner here than for most languages this site supports. A default Windows install ships no built-in Ukrainian voice at all, classic or OneCore — Microsoft's own supported-language list for Narrator's natural voices doesn't include it. Edge fills the gap with two Azure neural "Online" voices, Polina (female) and Ostap (male), which need a network connection but no GPU. Android's Google Text-to-Speech added a Ukrainian voice in a 2020s update. Apple has not shipped a dedicated built-in Ukrainian system voice on macOS or iOS as of this writing, so coverage there is inconsistent across OS versions.

The honest limits

Being precise about that, because it is the whole picture for Ukrainian: Supertonic is WebGPU-only with no WebAssembly fallback tier, and there is no Piper voice sitting underneath it the way there is for Spanish or Russian. On a desktop with a working GPU you get studio-grade 44.1kHz Ukrainian after a one-time ~380MB cached download. On a phone, or a desktop without WebGPU, you get whatever your OS or browser ships — Edge's Polina or Ostap Online voices are the better free option on Windows, Android's Google Ukrainian voice covers phones, and nothing neural in between if neither is available.

That is a narrower floor than languages with a Piper voice underneath the HD tier, and Windows in particular has no offline fallback at all for Ukrainian — there is no way to dress that up. It is the reason this page exists rather than a page claiming Ukrainian is fully covered.

Ukrainian stress is lexical and, in standard orthography, unmarked: the same written word can be stressed on different syllables depending on meaning or grammatical form, and nothing in the spelling tells a reader (or a model) which one applies. за́мок (castle) and замо́к (lock) are spelled identically without the accent mark most Ukrainian text never includes. A synthesis engine has to guess from context the same way a human reader does, and it guesses wrong often enough that an oddly-stressed word is a known limitation of the text, not proof the engine mis-synthesized it. The letter ґ (a hard /g/, distinct from the much more common г, a voiced /h/) is rare enough in everyday Ukrainian text that it is worth listening for specifically if a passage leans on it, since a model trained mostly on г-heavy text can under-render the distinction.

Nothing you paste is uploaded

This is the part that separates in-browser TTS from the cloud tools that look identical in a browser tab. A cloud tool sends your Ukrainian text to a server, synthesizes it there, and sends audio back — the page is a remote control. Quick TTS ships the engine to you instead and runs it on your CPU or GPU, so your text is never received by anyone. The test is simple: once the page and its model have loaded, the neural engines keep working with your network disconnected.

That matters most for the documents people actually want read aloud — a contract, a medical letter, coursework, an unpublished draft. It also means there is no "we phonemize non-English text on our server" asterisk, which is not true of every tool advertising local synthesis.

Reading Ukrainian documents, not just pasted text

PDF, DOCX, EPUB, ODT, RTF, HTML, TXT and Markdown are all parsed in the browser, so a whole Ukrainian EPUB or a long PDF opens and plays without a byte leaving your machine. A scanned PDF — a photo of text with no text layer — is handled by running OCR locally in WebAssembly rather than uploading the scan, which is precisely the case where local processing is worth the most.

Speed, volume and voice can all be changed mid-read and the current passage replays under the new settings without starting over. Switching the engine itself stops playback, so you press play once to start the new one — there is no mid-read handover of the remaining text between engines.

Frequently asked questions

Is Ukrainian text-to-speech free?

Yes. Quick TTS reads Ukrainian with no account, no character limit and no watermark. Synthesis runs in your browser on your own device, so there is no per-character server cost to meter and nothing to gate behind a sign-up.

Is my Ukrainian text uploaded anywhere?

No. The speech engine ships to your browser and runs locally, so the text you paste is turned into audio on your machine and never sent to a server. That is an architectural property, not a promise in a privacy policy — there is no server in the loop once the page has loaded.

What is the best Ukrainian TTS voice in the browser?

Supertonic HD is the highest-quality Ukrainian voice available here — 44.1kHz, running on WebGPU. It is also the only neural Ukrainian option: Piper ships no Ukrainian voice and Kokoro is English-only, so the alternative is your operating system's built-in voice. To get Ukrainian voices rather than English ones, open the app at quick-tts.com/uk/ — the neural voice list follows the page language.

Does it work on a phone?

The Web Speech API engine works on every modern phone with no download, and it is the default so the first play click always works. The neural engines are more demanding: Supertonic HD needs WebGPU and is effectively a desktop feature.

Can I download the Ukrainian audio?

Yes, as WAV or MP3, generated on your device. Anything longer than about 20,000 characters is packaged as a ZIP of audio parts so memory stays bounded on long documents.

Try it in Ukrainian — open the Українська app, not the English one

This is the one piece of setup worth knowing, because it is not obvious: the neural voice list follows the language of the page you are on. On the English homepage the Supertonic reads with the English language tag — so Ukrainian text pasted there will be pronounced as though it were English. Open the Українська version instead and the engine picks up Ukrainian automatically.

The one exception is Supertonic's "Auto language" toggle, which switches generation to a language-agnostic mode that reads mixed-language text with the right pronunciation per language without tagging anything by hand. That works from any page — it is the right choice for a document that is part Ukrainian and part English.

For the architecture behind all of this, see how in-browser text-to-speech works; for a tool-by-tool comparison with the other local TTS sites, see the comparison page.