Text-to-Speech (TTS) extension that transforms highlighted text into high-quality natural sounding audio using Google Cloud's…
Text-to-Speech (TTS) extension that transforms highlighted text into high-quality natural sounding audio using Google Cloud's Text-to-Speech.
You need to create your own API Key in order to use this extension (see the included video for instructions).
Features
- Support for all Google WaveNet, Neural2, News, Studio voices and languages.
- Adjustable pitch and speed.
- Download selected text to an MP3 file.
- SSML support
- Shortcut to read aloud (Cmd+Shift+S on macOS and Ctrl+Shift+S on windows)
- Shortcut to download selected text (Cmd+Shift+E on macOS and Ctrl+Shift+E on windows)
- Chunk selected text into sentences to bypass the 5000 character limit and lower usage cost.
Latest reviews
- (2023-10-15) J L: Very simple. Easy to use and really a brilliant idea. You should be proud of your work! Only thing is that, about 99% of the time, it doesn't do a single thing. No output whatsoever, no error message, nada. Even restarting the browser (or killing extension processes via system monitor) doesn't fix it. Since there's no documentation, I have no way to discover why this is happening or if the text I've selected might be breaking it or something. BB's version of your extension works for the same texts your extension fails at, and that's great and all, but his extension doesn't allow downloading for some silly reason! Perhaps related to the queuing, which I suspect is why that one works for me while yours doesn't, because I use it for long-form content. Regardless of length, though, once the extension decides to stop working, it won't work for anything, short or long. I do seem to recall an instance around maybe April, before the UI change, when I actually did receive an error message or two. Something about my sentences being too long. More documentation and more error messages would really be useful. If there's a tiny hint of an annoyingly entitled tone, by the way, it's just because your extension is so brilliant and it is totally frustrating that it won't work most of the time! :-( Really, take this as the highest praise. I want it and I can't have it, and it's driving me crazy! Thanks so much for making this. If you want to take it to the next level, figuring out a way to automatically rephrase texts that are incompatible with Wavenet (or the neural voices if there are any differences), as well as splitting up texts to skirt any length limits are probably the way to go. I've spent hours editing texts to get them to be compatible. It may seem silly, but it's for accessibility reasons, so it's worthwhile. I don't know if it's legal for you to make and sell one, but I would gladly pay $10 for a full application (assuming it's more reliable). But since you don't have one, is there a place people can donate to support this project? Thanks again for the wonderful extension—I just wish it were more reliable! Try out long texts to see if you can replicate the problem. If you want, I could send you a text file I know to be a problem for it, assuming you have contact info up on Google.
- (2023-10-10) David Solomon: Awesome extension. The SSML feature is not fully working, I have created an issue in github. Can you please lookinto it. The read aloud works but the download does not work. It will be really helpful if you can fix it.
- (2023-09-09) Ultimate Marketing Group: Fantastic extension, I love it. Nice and simple UI. Happy to see the extension get some updates, please keep it up. Wish it was available for firefox as well.
- (2023-08-27) Imran Q: I was using the read aloud extension and the google voices kept needing permissions from the demo site. This approach works much better and much more reliable! Amazing for reading articles and books especially when your eyes are tired or you want to take a walk!
- (2023-08-11) Gowri Shanker “GS Bellu” Bellu: 'Wavenet for Chrome' is the only chrome extension that I use. Simply superb. My heartfelt appreciation goes out to the developers for providing such a remarkable utility that greatly enhances my productivity.
- (2023-08-01) Marc-Olivier Bouchard (marcolivierbouch): Michael! What an amazing extension!
- (2023-08-01) Kyle Behse: This is a wonderful extension! Use it all the time! Latest release brought back sliders for speed and pitch. Better quality MP3s too! Great update!! Thanks, Michael!!
- (2023-07-27) Evgeniy Kuznetsov: Extension is great, I use it for my projects almost every day for MP3 downloads. And recent UI update was helpful too, I liked it. Thanks, Michael! Issue: After recent v.10 update it doesn't recognize SSML, not in sandbox, nor through context menu. Sorry but have you even tested it before release? And I was relying on you extension. Could please fix it ASAP. UPD: the issue is fixed in version 11. I had to install in manually just for now.
- (2023-07-27) Gina Benson: Using it everyday! Thanks! But the demo on the Google page has different audio profiles and some of them sounds much better than what it does on the extension,.. Any chance I get to customize this in the future??
- (2023-07-22) Andi Zulmai: I cannot download the voice in wav file more than 6 second. Please fix for more minutes..
- (2023-07-22) M Y: Hey, great work here! Since you made an update, I can't choose the speed I want. For example I was using 1.15 speed, but now it's just 1 or 1.25 open for choice. Thanks
- (2023-06-01) Saleh Almhameed: Great work, is there any way to improve the quality of the downloaded files?? they are kinda bad.
- (2023-02-19) Liam Taylor: Holy s**t, the new Studio voices are amazing! I haven't found a TTS service this good that's anywhere near this accessible. A highly useful extension!
- (2023-02-19) Jooyong Park: I sincerely thank the developers who created this program for the fantastic update!
- (2022-10-19) Deniz Perçin: When will you add Neural Link support? Thanks...
- (2022-06-28) Mani Shekar: Brilliant, extension! Thank you for this. Just a small issue with the SSML. It seems to work only with around 500 characters. Anything more and SSML is just plain ignored.
- (2022-06-10) Salman Tahir: Could increase the quality of the downloaded files. Right now there is a noticeable difference in quality. 5 stars.
- (2022-06-08) Bernhard K: It would be good to have the google Neural2 language as an option :)
- (2022-03-22) Sandy T.: I don't want to miss this little program anymore. The YouTube vid telling you how to set up your own API is really helpful -- so thanks for providing that. WaveNet for Chrome now reads all my texts -- and I love to have text read out loud to me, so I use it daily. As for the hotkeys, it takes a bit of getting used to the Ctrl-Shift-S for reading a text, but after a few days it's second nature.
- (2022-03-04) Kosta Kondratenko: This is awesome - I've been looking for a text to speech that actually sounds natural. I bought a Neutral Reader subscription which is $19 and was very close to shelling out $19USD p/month for NaturalReader. I loved IBM's Watson text to speech and also Google's cloud text to speech but they all had a character limit and I had a long list of notes that I wanted read back to me. Anyway - enough about my story - but I just wanted to show appreciation to the author. I had been working through API's, trying to figure out CURL commands, going back and forth with API teams and finally I have an extension that does EXACTLY what I want - highlight text - click to listen (to a real natural voice) - and click to download - and all I need to do is paste my Google API key. Beautiful. Thank you so much, I was staying up late trying to find a solution and now I can go to sleep feeling like a winner (L)
- (2022-01-05) Peter Jones: This is saving us a lot of time setting up Covid announcements on our PA system at work. No need to find an MP3 with Americanisms or clips that are not quite right. We can get Google WaveNet to voice our own scripts. Thanks! :)
- (2021-08-26) Felix Trautwein: Hey man, great app. Is there any way you would allow us to change the quality of the audio? The current downloaded audio sounds very low quality :(
- (2021-06-22) Rishit Shah: we are getting below error please make one new video for the setup as google system has changes and please allow to do download it as wave There was an error fetching the list of voices. Make sure your API key is valid.
- (2021-06-07) Alex Ruimy: Best extension in its class, thank you. Needs some improvements though: 1. If you enter the API key wrong (MacOS), you can't clear the textbox, so the wrong api message pops up every time the plugin window opens. That's all it does until you uninstall/reinstall. 2. Please allow us to regex the speech 3. Please add a setting to remove URLs from being spoken
- (2021-05-09) Matt S: Lmao they want to charge for this
- (2021-04-16) Prayers for Pets1 NonProfit: Love google always keeps old instructions up and they dont make sense because they are outdated. If a blog did that google would have fits.
- (2021-02-19) evil nero: Using Google Cloud is very hard to understand... This app does all the job.
- (2021-02-17) Mark Tran: Honestly the best program ever. I use it everyday and it has increased my productivity tenfold. I can't thank you guys who made this enough.
- (2020-10-18) Arthur Bisle: Possibly the best sound quality available in 2020. Unfortunately only 5000 characters limit for a single voice generation query (this limitation is set by wavenet, but a workaround could definitely be found). No playback button on the toolbar, only hotkey and right-click menu. Not hotkey for stop. And you've got to get a so-called API Key on WaveNet web site in the first place. Which is not that easy but there's a pretty good guide helping you get through.
- (2020-10-11) Matthew: It just works. You have to have an API key and know what you're doing, but if you do, it works and works well. I just wish it had an easier pause feature!
- (2020-10-09) John Gralyan: This extensions is absolutely awesome! Simple, functional, excellent! Thanks for this awesome, open source contribution!!! :)
- (2020-07-25) Chris Chong: Thanks for creating this wonderful tool & best of all it's offered for FREE OF CHARGE! How great is that! Thanks to the development team! Google's WaveNet is probably the closest human-like voices we can get on the internet! Try it now & you won't regret it, its output quality amazes me!
- (2020-03-18) Sales Audio Power Co., Ltd.: I've tried a lot of extensions and this one is the BEST
- (2020-03-02) Faruk F: Hi, is there any way to remove or change 5000 limit?
- (2020-02-27) Khelladi Oussama: Amazing joooooob thank youuuuuu, i have a question is there any way to integrate google cloud on android phone as a tts engine ?
- (2020-02-24) Phuong Phan: This's amazing. Let's enjoy your work. Thanks.
- (2020-02-18) Kostas K: I've never left another extension review despite using dozen for close to a decade. This extension is amazing.
- (2020-02-15) Qwerty: I love your chrome extention very much. and i am using it almost everyday by producing sentence to study dutch language. The reason i want to contact you is that i want to ask if it is possible to improve the mp3 quality? According to the documentation, 'The quality of the OGG_opus is considerably higher than MP3 while using approximately the same bitrate.' and The result will be a file which can be played natively on Android, and in browsers (at least Chrome and Firefox). so would you consider to improve the sound quality by adding OGG file output in the update ? let us know. here you can see the documentation: https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/reference/rest/v1/text/synthesize?hl=nl#audioconfig
- (2019-12-21) Chris Banach: while the extension is great, when i try to open the downloaded MP3 in Adobe Premiere or Soundbooth or even Audacity, the file crashes. I get an "unsupported format or damaged file. the weird part is, as if the mp3 file itself changes because of the crash, because when i originally play it, it works well. then when i open it in Premiere Pro, it doesn't import it. But then, when trying to play it again, it plays random weird noises instead, like an audio tape playing accelerated or a disk scratch. the only workaround that bug i found is to first convert the file through an online audio converter (such as https://online-audio-converter.com thereby reducing the kbps for example to 192kbps. then you download the new file and voila! magically now your file is opened properly by Adobe apps an Audacity. Not sure what causes this bug, but it may have to do with my Nvidia graphic cards (i have two GeForce GTX 660 Ti configured through SLI), just an idea, because since my displays are spanned with surround, Nvidia doesn't recognize for example Audio from one of the two screens. anyway, fantastic extension, but it sucks to download mp3s i can't edit directly. a waste of time, but in the end i got it to work through my workaround.
- (2019-12-14) Odin: Great tool, much appreciated, is there anyway to remove the 5000 character limit set by google when converting to mp3?
- (2019-11-26) Robert Woeger: I appreciate WaveNet for Chrome very much on my Mac. I really need to be able to save lossless files for importing the WaveNet audios into my videos and into other projects. The current MP3 mono 24Khz 16 bit saved format is rather limiting for me. Is there any way you can save to FLAC or WAV or Apple Lossless file formats as a stereo file at 44.1kHz 16 bit audio instead of as a mono 24kHz 16 bit MP3 file, which really limits the audio quality that is saved? Thank You.
- (2019-10-14) Matti Suomenaro: Thank you for making this. It is an incredible accessibility tool!
- (2019-09-24) PB M: Wonderful! Should add a shortcut to download Google API key costs money.
- (2019-09-13) DJay ': Easy to set up. Thanks for the YouTube Video how the get the API Key. Looking forward to you ongoing development. Thanks for the time you are investing and sharing.
- (2019-09-11) Dayn Wilkins: Fantastic extension! Just what we needed to generate audio for our e-learning projects! Many many thanks.
- (2019-09-09) phly95 :: Great extension. I wish I could input long text documents as well as download as a WAV or OPUS file.
- (2019-08-16) Miguel Ceja: This is, by far, the easiest way in which I've been able to get Wavenet audio as a downloadable file. I spent many hours last year trying to find an app that could do this. Thanks for the developer for such an amazing extension!
- (2019-08-15) Christian Lane: Works well, though I cannot get shortcuts to work. They simply don't work, anything I can try to fix it?
- (2019-08-12) Tim Faber: I rarely write reviews but in this case I'll make an exception: I simply love this extension! Leveraging the powerful Wavenet text-to-speech from Google, with this extension you can simply select text and have the computer read it out loud in a close-to-human fashion. A way to make this extension even better, would be to get rid of the 5.000 character limit.
- (2019-07-21) Zhou Peng: Very good. ^ ^