Read Aloud Extension

Listen to any web page — a read aloud extension with natural text to speech voices, speed control and sentence highlighting.

Listen to articles instead of reading them. Read Aloud Extension turns any web page into audio: open a page, press play, and a small floating player appears in the corner and starts to read the text aloud with natural text to speech voices already available in Chrome and on your computer. Playback does not stop when you leave the tab. The reading queue lives in the extension's background worker instead of the page, so the voice keeps going while you answer an email, scroll somewhere else, or let Chrome freeze the tab to save memory. Come back and the player is exactly where you left it — no restarting the paragraph, no silence halfway through. ━━━━━━ WHAT YOU CAN DO ━━━━━━ ▸ Start in one click — toolbar button or Alt+Shift+R, and the page is read aloud from the top ▸ Begin anywhere — hold Alt and click any paragraph to read from that exact spot ▸ Hear only what you need — select text, right-click, and listen to that part alone ▸ Read PDF aloud — open a PDF in the built-in reader and it is spoken like any article ▸ Follow along — the current sentence and the spoken word are highlighted as the voice moves ▸ Move around — jump to the previous or next paragraph straight from the player ▸ Set the pace — speed from 0.75x to 3x, click or scroll the speed button ▸ Tune the tone — pitch control for a voice that sits comfortably in your ear ▸ Choose a highlight — five colors, or switch highlighting off for a clean page ▸ Drag the player anywhere — it remembers the spot across every site you visit ━━━━━━ VOICES THAT DO NOT SOUND ROBOTIC ━━━━━━ A text to speech reader is only as good as the voice behind it. The voice list here is grouped by language, and the highest-quality ones are marked with a star, so you are not scrolling past a dozen toy system voices to find a natural one. Cloud voices carry a ☁ mark: they sound smoother and more human. Offline voices keep working with no connection at all and handle higher speeds, which matters once you get used to listening at 2x and above. Leave the picker on Auto and the language of the page is detected for you, then matched to a suitable voice. Moving between English news, a Spanish blog and a German forum needs no setup in between — every page is read aloud in its own language. ━━━━━━ IT READS THE ARTICLE, NOT THE CLUTTER ━━━━━━ Navigation, sidebars, footers, cookie notices and hidden elements are skipped. The article body is located first, and the full page is used only when there is nothing better, so listening begins at the headline rather than at "Skip to main content". Long paragraphs are split into short phrases before they are spoken, which keeps cloud voices from cutting off mid-sentence on a wall of text. ━━━━━━ PDFS TOO ━━━━━━ Chrome's own PDF viewer keeps its text locked away from extensions, which is why most readers stop at the edge of a PDF. This one ships its own reader instead: open a PDF from the toolbar, or right-click a PDF link, and the text is laid out as plain paragraphs and read aloud with the same voices, the same speed control and the same highlighting as a web page. Scanned PDFs are pictures of text with nothing underneath, so those cannot be read — the reader says so rather than sitting there silently. ━━━━━━ WHERE IT HELPS ━━━━━━ • A reading list longer than the time you have — turn the backlog into a commute, a walk or a workout • Long papers, reports and documentation that are easier to get through by ear than by eye • Proofreading your own draft, where hearing a sentence read out loud catches what the eye slides over • Accessibility, low vision, dyslexia, or simply a preference for listening over reading ━━━━━━ GOOD TO KNOW ━━━━━━ No account, no sign-up, no registration wall standing between you and the play button. What you read is yours: no page addresses, no page text, no selections and no PDF contents ever leave your browser. The extension reports only anonymous counts — how often reading starts, which settings get changed, when a voice is missing — so the rough edges can be found and fixed. Offline voices run entirely on your own computer; cloud voices marked ☁ are spoken by the speech engine built into Chrome, the same one the browser uses for its own accessibility features. Chrome does not allow extensions to run on internal browser pages or on the Web Store, so those stay outside its reach. Found a site that reads badly, or missing a voice you were hoping for? Send a note through the support tab — every report is read.