Sayback: Read Aloud & Text to Speech

Read any page aloud with the voices already on your computer. Offline text to speech — no account, no cloud, no quota.

Sayback reads web pages out loud using the voices that are already installed on your computer. That one design choice decides everything else. There is no account to make, no monthly fee, no character quota, and no page of yours ever reaches a server — because the voice is running on your own machine, not somebody else's. WHAT IT DOES • Click the toolbar button, press Alt+R, or right-click and choose "Read aloud". Sayback finds the article on the page and starts reading. • Select some text first and it reads exactly that instead. • A small bar appears at the bottom of the page: play/pause, speed, and the voice in use. The sentence being spoken is highlighted as it goes. • Works on articles, documentation, blogs, and long-form pages, including sites that keep their content inside an iframe. MADE FOR LONG READING • Pronunciation dictionary — teach it that "GIF" is "jif", or fix a name it keeps mangling. • Skip rules — stop it from reading footnote markers, parentheses, ellipses, tildes, or emoji out loud. • Per-site settings (Pro) — a different voice and speed on arXiv than on your news reader. • Resume reading (Pro) — close a long article halfway through and Sayback picks up from the sentence you stopped on. PRIVACY Sayback has no server. It asks for no standing access to any website: it uses Chrome's activeTab permission, so it can only see the page at the moment you ask it to read one. There is no telemetry and no analytics. Some voices Chrome offers are streamed from a remote service. Sayback hides those by default; you can turn them on in settings if you want them. FREE AND PRO Everything above — reading, highlighting, speed control, voice selection — is free and stays free. Pro is a one-time $5 purchase, no subscription, that adds per-site settings, resume reading, and removes the limits on the pronunciation dictionary and skip rules. Payment is handled by Polar. No account needed; you get a licence key. REQUIREMENTS Sayback uses the text-to-speech voices your operating system provides. If your computer has no local voice for the language you are reading, add one through your OS settings (Windows: Settings > Time & Language > Speech; macOS: System Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content).