Genie Reader — the macOS app and the Chrome extension — turns text into spoken audio entirely on your own device. This policy is short because there isn't much to disclose: we don't collect, store, or transmit your data.
In one sentence: the text you read and the audio Genie Reader generates never leave your computer.
Both the app and the extension use Kokoro, an open-source text-to-speech model, run locally via ONNX Runtime — on your machine's own CPU or GPU. The text you want read is processed entirely in memory, on-device, to produce audio. It is not uploaded anywhere to be converted.
The first time you use Genie Reader, it downloads the Kokoro model's weight files from Hugging Face's public model hub, so the app has the model to run locally. This is a plain, anonymous file download — no page content, text, or personal data is included in that request. After the first download, the model is cached and every later use works fully offline.
None of this local data is accessible to us — we simply don't have a server it could be sent to.
The Chrome extension requests a small set of permissions, each used for exactly one purpose:
Genie Reader is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect information from anyone, of any age — since it doesn't collect information at all.
If this policy ever changes, we'll update the date at the top of this page. Given the app's design — everything local, nothing collected — we don't expect that to happen often.
Questions about this policy or how Genie Reader works can be sent to mazenkasser85@gmail.com or filed as an issue on GitHub.