Name Phonics lives in your Mac's menu bar. Copy a name, play it with ⌃⌥P, and hear it spoken by a voice native to its origin — with a phonetic respelling you can read at a glance.
Hindi · India
Priyanka
pree-YAHN-kah
/priːˈjʌŋkaː/
▶ uses your browser's voices — the app uses macOS voices, which sound far better.
copy & play
No window to open, no name to retype. Copy the name in whatever app it's already in — your email, your ATS, your roster, your chart — and play it back said right. Three seconds from “how do I say this?” to knowing.
STEP 1
⌘C in any app. Seeing it in an image or a PDF you can't select? Press ⌃⌥G and drag a box around it instead.
STEP 2
Name Phonics identifies the name's origin and picks an installed macOS voice native to that language — Vietnamese for Nguyễn, Irish-accented for Saoirse.
STEP 3
The name is spoken aloud while a floating panel shows the respelling — pree-YAHN-kah — with the stressed syllable highlighted.
what's in the menu bar
Every language macOS speaks, matched automatically. Pick a favorite voice per language in the Voices window, and download Apple's higher-quality voices free.
Profile cards, images, PDFs, video calls: press ⌃⌥G, drag a box, and on-device text recognition reads the name — nothing is uploaded.
⌃⌥T opens a Spotlight-style box: type any name, hear it instantly, repeat it until it sticks.
⌃⌥S speaks slowly with a pause between name parts; ⌃⌥R replays the last name any time you need it again.
A free offline analyzer works out of the box. Want more accuracy? Plug in your own Claude or OpenAI key, or a local model — each name is analyzed once, then cached.
Every name you've looked up, kept on your Mac. Search it before the follow-up call and play it again — normal speed or slow.
why it exists
As a developer with dyslexia, letters don't reliably become sounds for me even in English — so a spelling I'd never seen before, landing on a meeting invite an hour before the call, meant a genuine anxiety spike. I'd go out of my way to never say the name out loud: rearranging sentences, leaning on “hey” and “you two,” hoping someone else would say it first. Because it's never the names you know that trip you up — it's the ones you've only ever seen written down.
Name Phonics isn't perfect, and a synthesized voice never will be. It doesn't have to be. Hearing the name — even robotically — replaces guessing with knowing. I press play a few times before the meeting, and then I just say it. If names do this to you too, this is your tool. And if you're a recruiter, teacher, or clinician whose day is full of names from everywhere, it works just as hard for you.
“I used to rearrange whole sentences to avoid saying a name I couldn't read. Now I hear it before the meeting — and I say it.”
privacy
Name Phonics has no account, no analytics, and no server of ours behind it. Text recognition runs on-device. The optional AI lookup sends only the name itself, to a provider you choose, under your own key.