Lisen: Free Read Aloud with Cartesia Voices

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

Listen to any article with your Cartesia voices, free. Lisen is a free Chrome extension that reads web pages aloud with the Cartesia voices you already pay for, and costs nothing on top. No subscription, no account to create. Reads what you already read. Articles, blog posts, newsletters, documentation, Substack, Medium, long threads: anything with a body of text on the page. Listen on the commute, while cooking, or when your eyes have had enough of the screen. Follows along on the page. Click the icon on an article and a small player appears. As it reads, the current passage is tinted and the spoken word is marked, so you never lose your place. Start now, or generate the whole thing. Streaming starts speaking as soon as you press play. Ahead of time generates the full article first, then shows the exact length and a bar you can scrub. Every number on the player is measured from the audio; nothing is estimated. Your account, your voices. Paste your Cartesia API key and pick any voice in your library, including voices you have cloned or designed there. You pay Cartesia for what you generate and nothing else. Save it as audio. Download any article as a WAV. The word timings are stored in the file, so read-along works when you open it again. Nothing leaves until you press play. There is no Lisen server. Your key and settings stay in Chrome on your device. Page text goes to Cartesia only when you press play, and only from pages where you opened the player. No analytics, no telemetry. 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. Does it work on PDFs and paywalled pages? It reads whatever the page shows you. Chrome does not let extensions run in its built-in PDF viewer, on its own pages, or on the Web Store; the icon shows a badge there.