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

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-book conversion fee, and why your library stays yours.

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.