Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader
Extension Actions
CRX ID
hdhinadidafjejdhmfkjgnolgimiaplp
Status
- Extension status: Featured
- Live on Store
Description from extension meta
Read aloud the current web-page article with one click, using text to speech (TTS). Supports 40+ languages.
Image from store
Description from store
Read Aloud uses text-to-speech (TTS) technology to convert webpage text to audio. It works on a variety of websites, including news sites, blogs, fan fiction, publications, textbooks, school and course materials. Read Aloud helps users who prefer to listen to content instead of reading, including children learning to read and those with dyslexia or other learning disabilities.
Read Aloud allows you to select from a variety of text-to-speech voices, including native voices provided by the browser and AI voices from cloud providers such as Google Wavenet, Amazon Polly, IBM Watson, Microsoft Azure, and OpenAI. Cloud-based voices may require additional in-app purchase or bringing your own API key to enable.
Read Aloud can read PDF, Google Docs, Google Play books, Amazon Kindle, and EPUB (via the excellent EPUBReader extension from epubread.com).
To use Read Aloud, navigate to the web page you want to read, then click the Read Aloud icon on the browser menu. You can also use the shortcut keys ALT-P, ALT-O, ALT-Comma, and ALT-Period to activate the extension. If some text is selected, Read Aloud will read only the selected text. Additionally, you can right click the text selection and start Read Aloud from the context menu.
To change the voice, reading speed, pitch, or enable text highlighting, go to the Options page via the Gear button on the extension popup (you'll need to stop playback to see the Gear button). You can also access the Options page from the context menu by right clicking the extension icon.
On the extension popup, there are buttons to increase/decrease the the size of the popup window, the font size, as well as toggle dark mode.
Read Aloud is an open-source project. If you wish to contribute bug fixes or translations, please visit the GitHub page at https://github.com/ken107/read-aloud
Latest reviews
- Alexa Liguori
- I got a concussion and this extension is the only way I'm keeping up in class. The voice is very robotic but it's a complete life saver. Thank you for making this!!
- saab virk
- I tried many Extensions but this is the best
- Denise Sanders
- It is helpful for very text heavy sites, but it tends not to say the first word of a section, so it hinders comprehension.
- Daniel Torres
- It works. 👍🏼
- J Beuthling
- Pretty good.. I set it to a different male voice on my pc .. not bad.. I didn't want to read this doc. had to fiddle with the speed etc.. Thank you !
- junkolow
- It sounds so mechanical and no intonation. Messages do not go into my head as it speaks so monotonous.
- Lukas Vog
- Feature Request: I love shortcuts and use them dailyyy. Could you add faster/slower to the chrome shortcut options? 🔥 Kind regards, Luke
- bunnycloud B.
- Very Good.
- Stopban Clear
- I was using it but it suddenly stopped working. This happened to both Google accounts. It kept showing "Loading". It is very annoying. Even remove it and then add it again, it's just loading, not working at all
- ばばむー
- It's very good! In Japanese, Google's standard voice "Daniel" was particularly easy for me to understand. there were some areas where it struggled—like reading URLs or mispronouncing symbols like * or ・. It also had trouble correctly pronouncing proper nouns like "Notion." It would be great if users could manually exclude content they don't want read aloud, or have an option to disable reading of symbols and URLs altogether.
- Jorge Medrano
- really useful
- Hanna Hoa
- good
- Itzel William
- Almost good, no problems
- Rahul A (Rahul)
- I don't know why.. but it always reads brackets and dots for me. could be better if there was an option to skip reading certain elements.
- Meteorren
- Not terrible but it skips over paragraphs randomly
- Yashar Valakjie
- Amazing easy to make it work with no fuss! 5/5!
- Jeff M
- Works great! Just highlight and it reads perfect!!
- Sophie Shram
- doesnt work for me? it says "this extensions gallery cannot be scripted"
- Karen Dali
- I'd give 5 stars but it is irritating how the period at the end of "Mrs." is read as the end of the sentence. It doesn't do it with Mr. or with abbreviations such as N. P. so why Mrs.? Otherwise it's fantastic!
- One Outs
- Cantonese reading is not so good, kinda slow too, hope will make improvement in the future.
- Lisa Blakey
- Almost perfect. What would make it better is a natural pause between paragraphs, after bullet points, and cells in tables. Without that natural pause (similar to when there is punctuation), the reader runs text together that don't belong together into one giant sentence. For example, the heading of a section with the first sentence of the section, all the bullet points in a list, or all the cells in a table become one giant sentence. To fix this, treat a new paragraph, the end of a bullet point, or a new cell in a table like punctuation, and pause. A nice to have would be a text highlighter following along with the reader.
- O P
- Cant get it to work
- A Social Ninja Network
- I've been using this application as a Google Developer Expert for over a year now and still love it from when I was just a civilian 34 years ago! keep up the good work guys nothin but luv! Ninja-man™
- Robert “Bob” Breckenridge
- Good over all rating from me; very helpful. It is disorienting to listen to this app, however, when there are phrases, which are titles or section headers or other non-sentence language structures because they are currently being read by the narrator as if they were the start to the sentence following them. It would dramatically reduce the stress for humans of constantly decyphering, while the narrator forges onward, the intent of the current reading, if instead there were a 1-second pause after each non-sentence phrase, which is how humans seem to typically read such introductory phrases.
- Aayush Sahay
- Missing a loto f useful features like speed control and highlight
- Nolan Tucker
- I it helped me do my I ready
- Ryan Ognek
- I love this extension, I use it daily. One of my grievances is that when reading out a bulleted list with no periods, the voice makes it seem as though it is all one sentence or one word. Would love to see that fixed.
- FA VA
- Always Error: Failed to fetch translations. Wait and try again
- Pavel P
- Great useful app extension one of the best available
- Nia
- Very useful.
- Damaris Gonzalez
- its not reading for me it keeps saying coudnt read text
- Ivan Lamden
- ultra ugly voices, impossible to hear
- callanyonefrompc
- Could be a lot better. It is as basic as a TTS extension can get. Either use an ugly popup window, or right click selected text and use the context menu. No faster left-click button options. No shortcut hotkeys. Other extensions show the various blocks of text you can select and left-clicking will automatically select that highlighted block. But on this extension, you have to click and drag your mouse to select an area. It's okay if you just want something basic, but I'm looking for something with more polish and more features.
- Esther Unachukwu
- helpful for school
- Ali Reza Barkhordari
- Very useful extension. If it highlighted the sentence or word being read, it would be perfect.
- Ty Buchanan
- The voice is in British (posh) English. It is difficult to understand. In short ,Google Read Allowed is useless. It should give a list voices to chooe from.
- Claire Jacobs
- Works alright for what it is. Has some issues with registering grammar (eg. not recognising when to finish reading dialogue as a sentence, and instead runs into the next one.), as well as skipping one-line sentences that might be offset from the rest of the text. Otherwise, I haven't had any other issues.
- Meg
- No lee
- fermin salaberry
- 5/5 perfect! JUST PERFECT! I can finaly start digging in my google play books list and soon enough I will have to get new books! Simple... efficient...
- Raghavendhar Sekar
- Super cool
- Alexander Pushkin
- Best TTS extension. Big thanks to creators.
- Comrade Max
- the offered voices often sound weird, maybe a way to star and pin the ones preferred by user could be useful, also, some internet pages dont allow the use of this extension, and i get it, "policies" or whatever.. but having an alternative to do it anyways would be appreciated, like idk some page to ctrl+c ctrl+v the text i want and still regardless have it read to me, that would be an almost universal solution (and really preferably without any severe limit like text-length)
- Electrophon
- Excellent extension for reading college textbooks pdfs. Although the speed is capped at x10. If possible, please increase the limit of the speed. Thank you for making this extension!
- Nathan Guiger
- Stopped working unless I leave it on auto voice select, utter garbage
- John Weiss
- Powerful, but not lightweight. Access to many free natural voices! Works great.
- Sissy Cooley
- Horrible! Uses zero recognition of grammar and punctuation. Reads everything (regardless of speed setting) as one long run on sentence, making it impossible to follow or comprehend the material.
- eDee Bruns
- I highlight an area, but it starts at the beginning of the Google doc every time - completely useless. It's like it doesn't realize it's only supposed to read the highlighted area.
- Jose Javier Perez Rosa
- Love it! This is what I needed for college textbooks. Once again, thank you!
- Nathaniel Honomichl
- voice is very clear doesn't lag crome on my low end device and actually pronounces words very clearly
- Jordan
- This Read Aloud Extension is good not the best. I'm using 1 AI voice on this extension that's worked and sound good. This extension is at least good enough I'll keep using it