Made by one person,
runs on your Mac.
Unknown is built by Nithin Gaddam, an independent software developer. No venture funding, no growth team, no data pipeline - just one person building the reading tools he wanted to exist.
Why Unknown exists
The main reason is personal. Nithin has mild ADHD, and focusing on a page has always been a fight - eyes drifting off the text, the same paragraph read three times, books abandoned halfway. Unknown is the fix he built for himself: it reads the book aloud so there is a voice to follow instead of a page to drift from, and scheduled reading sessions hold him in the book until the time is up, so the book actually gets finished.
The second reason is privacy. Most of the reading that matters - textbooks, research papers, reports, manuals - lives in PDFs, and most tools that read them aloud either sound robotic or upload your documents to someone else's servers. Unknown was built to do both things properly: neural narration that is worth listening to for hours, generated entirely on your own Mac, so nothing you read ever leaves your machine.
That on-device rule shapes every feature. Narration, OCR for scanned pages, the AI you can ask about a chapter, the mind maps - all of it runs locally. It is why the app works offline, why there is no per-document conversion fee, and why your library stays yours.
There is one deliberate exception, for people without a Mac. The web reader and the iPhone and iPad app can convert a document in the cloud instead, and they say so before anything is sent. Those documents are kept only until your devices download them and are never read by a person. The Mac app never needs it.
The other apps
Unknown has two siblings, built the same way: bloq, a distraction blocker for Mac and iPhone, and Donna, a meeting assistant for Mac. Small, focused tools with the same privacy-first approach.
Get in touch
Questions, bug reports, and feature requests all land in the same inbox: support@unknown.ac. You can also follow development on X or find the projects on GitHub. Every message gets read by the person who wrote the code.