Text to Speech
Have any text read aloud in your browser.
Nothing queued yet
No voices are available in this browser yet. They usually appear a moment after the page loads — if they never do, your operating system may have no speech voices installed, which is common on a fresh Linux setup.
There's no download button here for an honest reason: browsers don't let a page capture the audio their speech engine produces, so we can't save it as a file without sending your text to a paid cloud service. We'd rather do neither.
Runs entirely in your browser — nothing you enter is uploaded or sent to a server.
The voices come from your own device, so the list — and how natural they sound — differs between computers and phones, and some systems have none installed. There's no download: browsers don't let a page capture the audio their speech engine produces. Read our full disclaimer.
About this tool
Your operating system already has a speech engine — it's what powers screen readers and read-aloud in your phone — and browsers let a web page use it. This tool is a front end for that. Paste in an article you'd rather listen to than read, or a paragraph you're proofreading, pick a voice, and press play. Because the synthesis happens on your own device, there's no account, no per-character charge and no text sent anywhere. Reading your own writing aloud is also the fastest way to catch a clumsy sentence — your ear notices what your eye skims over.
Try it for proofreading
Paste in something you've written and listen at about 1.2× speed. Sentences that run too long, repeated words and missing connectives are far more obvious heard than read — it's the oldest editing trick there is.
How to use
- 1Paste or type the text you want read aloud.
- 2Pick a voice — they're grouped by language, with your own language first.
- 3Adjust speed, pitch and volume until it's comfortable.
- 4Press Read it aloud; pause, resume or stop at any point.
Features
- Uses the voices already on your device, so nothing is downloaded or charged for.
- Voices grouped by language, with on-device ones listed first — those work offline.
- Independent speed, pitch and volume control.
- Long text is split into short passages and queued, which works around a Chrome bug that silently cuts off long readings.
Frequently asked questions
Can I download the audio?
No, and it's worth being clear why: browsers deliberately don't expose the audio their speech engine generates to the page, so there's no way to save it as a file without sending your text off to a paid cloud service. Sites that offer an MP3 download are doing exactly that. We'd rather not.
Why do I have different voices from someone else?
Because they belong to your operating system, not to us. Windows, macOS, Android and iOS each ship their own set, and you can usually install more in your system's accessibility or language settings — anything you add there appears here.
There are no voices at all. What now?
They sometimes take a second to appear after the page loads, so wait a moment. If the list stays empty, your system probably has no speech voices installed — most common on a fresh Linux install, where installing a package like speech-dispatcher with a voice set fixes it.
Why does it stop part-way through long text?
That's a long-standing Chrome bug: it goes quiet after roughly fifteen seconds of a single utterance. We work around it by splitting your text at sentence endings and queueing the pieces, so you should hear the whole thing — that's also why the tool shows a passage count.
What does 'on device' mean next to a voice?
That voice is installed locally, so it needs no network connection and responds instantly. The others are streamed by your browser's vendor and may pause on a poor connection — worth choosing a local one if you've installed this site as an app.
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