Lisen: Free Read Aloud with Cartesia Voices

Free read aloud for any article or PDF with your Cartesia voices. No subscription on top of your Cartesia plan.

Listen to any article or PDF with your Cartesia voices, free. Lisen is a free Chrome extension that reads web pages and PDFs aloud with the Cartesia voices you already pay for. There is no subscription on top, no account to create and no Lisen server. Paste your Cartesia API key, click the icon on an article, and it starts reading. WHAT IT READS Articles, blog posts, newsletters, documentation, Substack, Medium, long threads, papers and reports: anything with a body of text. Lisen pulls the article out of the page and leaves the navigation, sidebars, cookie banners and comments behind, so you hear the writing and nothing else. The headline is read first, then the article, headings included. PDFs open in Lisen's own viewer with the same player. The document's prose is read in order; running headers, footers and page numbers are skipped. It works on PDFs from the web, and on files on your computer once you allow file URLs for Lisen in chrome://extensions, or simply drop the file onto the viewer. If you can see an article behind a paywall, you can hear it too: Lisen reads whatever the page shows you. FOLLOW ALONG ON THE PAGE As Lisen reads, the passage being spoken is tinted and the current word is marked, in the article itself, not in a separate window. Look away, come back, and you know exactly where you are. Pick the highlight colour, or turn highlighting off. Code boxes that scroll sideways scroll to keep the spoken word in view. READ LIKE A NARRATOR Articles are not only prose, and Lisen handles the rest the way a good narrator would: • Code blocks are announced in a sentence ("Python code example.") instead of being read character by character. A single short line, usually a command, is still read, and inline code inside a sentence is always read. • Tables are described: their caption, how many columns and what they are called, how many rows. • Numbered lists keep their numbers. Nested lists are read as their own sentences. • Standalone images are read behind "Image:" so they are not mistaken for body text. • A quotation's attribution is read as its own sentence after the quote. The element being described is highlighted while it is spoken, so the read-along never goes dark. START NOW, OR GENERATE THE WHOLE THING Two ways to synthesize, and you choose: • Streaming starts speaking the moment you press play. Best for reading right now. • Ahead of time generates the entire article first, then shows the exact length and a bar you can scrub through. Best for long reads you want to skip around in. Every number on the player is measured from the audio Cartesia returned. Nothing is estimated. YOUR ACCOUNT, YOUR VOICES Every voice in your Cartesia library is available, including voices you have cloned or designed there. Pick one from the player and switch whenever you like. Choose the Cartesia model too, so you always have the newest one. Speed from 0.6x to 2x. Skip forward and back by 15 seconds. CONTROLS WHERE YOU EXPECT THEM • Space to play and pause, left and right arrows to skip, while the player is open. • Your keyboard's media keys and the system's now-playing controls work too, like any other audio. • The player is a small card that sits over the page. Drag it wherever you want; it remembers. SAVE IT AS AUDIO Download any article as a WAV file. The word timings are stored in the file, so read-along still works when you open it again. NOTHING LEAVES UNTIL YOU PRESS PLAY • No Lisen server. No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reports. • Your API key and settings stay in Chrome's extension storage on your device. Removing the extension deletes them. • The text of a page is sent to Cartesia only when you press play, and only from the page where you opened the player. • No host permissions: nothing of Lisen loads into a page you did not click on. It asks for activeTab (the tab you clicked, for that click), scripting (to show the player on that tab) and storage (your key and preferences). Full privacy policy: https://lisen.augustin.zip/privacy/ GETTING STARTED 1. Add Lisen to Chrome. 2. Create an API key in your Cartesia account and paste it into the player. Once. 3. Open an article or a PDF, click the Lisen icon, press play. QUESTIONS Do I need a Cartesia account? Yes. Lisen speaks through Cartesia, so you need an account and an API key from it. What does it cost? Lisen is free. You pay Cartesia for the speech you generate, on whatever plan you have with them, which starts with a free tier. There is no Lisen subscription. Which voices and languages? Every voice in your Cartesia library, in every language the Cartesia model you pick supports. Does it work on scanned PDFs? Not yet. A PDF with no text layer says so; there is no OCR. Where does it not work? Chrome does not let extensions run on its own pages or on the Web Store. The icon shows a badge there. Which browsers? Chrome, from the Chrome Web Store. Other browsers are not supported yet. Support: sudoaugustin@gmail.com Website: https://lisen.augustin.zip/