EarkeysEnglish listening practice in your menu bar. Press ⌥Space, listen to one sentence, type what you heard, and see which words your ear skipped. Try it below.
This is the voice you get in the app: Kokoro, recorded straight from Earkeys. It runs on your Mac, with 20 voices to pick from.
Reading English and catching it at speaking speed are different skills. The small words go first.
We should have caught this in staging before it hit production.
We should have caught this in staging before it hit production.
Drag Earkeys to Applications. On first launch it downloads the Kokoro voice once (250 MB) and plays a sample while you wait.
EarkeysEarkeys switches to the natural voice by itself once it’s ready.
Like Spotlight, but for your ears. Tests running, a reply on its way, a deploy in progress: press it while you wait, and the bar opens near the top of the screen with the next sentence. Esc puts it away.
One sentence plays in a natural voice. Replay it, slow it down, then type what you heard.
Press Return. Every word is marked, so you learn which sounds you skip, not just that you got it wrong. The Vietnamese meaning shows after you answer.
A sentence you miss returns today. Each time you get it right it waits longer: 1, 3, 7, then 16 days. A miss sends it back to the start.
A miss at any box sends the sentence back to Box 0.
Practice them all from Deck › Review Mistakes · 5 due, hardest first
In Shadowing mode Earkeys reads the sentence, then listens while you repeat it. Unclear words are marked, and common slips come with a tip. ⌘P plays back your try.
Connect Claude, Codex, Cursor or another assistant from the Earkeys menu, then ask in your own words. It can also read what you keep missing and build a deck for it.
Sentences you hear right on the first listen count as mastered. Progress shows the speed you can follow, your practice days, and which sounds you still miss.
Example data
macOS 14 or later. Shadowing works out of the box on macOS 26; on earlier versions, turn on Dictation in System Settings › Keyboard first.
Three general decks are built in, from Basic to Advanced. Open any plain-text file and Earkeys splits it into sentences. Or ask an AI assistant for a deck on any topic: incident calls, standups, interviews, travel.
Kokoro gives you 20 natural US English voices, made on your Mac's Neural Engine after a one-time 250 MB download. You can also use any macOS voice; Earkeys picks the best installed US English voice and labels Premium and Enhanced ones. Set the speed in words per minute.
No account. After the Kokoro download it works offline. Decks, review history and progress stay on your Mac, and speech recognition runs on your Mac too. See the privacy page.
Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, VS Code and Windsurf. Connect one in a click from Connect AI Agents in the Earkeys menu. Earkeys runs a small local MCP server, so the assistant can read and write your decks and see which words you miss.
Earkeys lives in your menu bar, needs no account, and keeps your decks and review history on your Mac. Open the DMG, drag it to Applications, and press ⌥Space.