Text2Voice — Text to Speech Reader: Listen to Any Article Aloud

Text to speech with personality: eleven readers, one picked to suit the page. Highlights as it reads. Skips tables and code.

Turn any article into something you can listen to. Press the button and Text2Voice finds the article on the page — skipping the navigation, the adverts and the comment section — then reads it aloud in a voice that suits it. A news story gets a news anchor. A tutorial gets a patient teacher. A short story gets a storyteller. Or pick a reader you like and have them read everything. ELEVEN VOICES, EACH WITH ITS OWN MANNER OF READING This is text to speech that does not sound like an announcement board. A tutorial is explained rather than recited. The day's headlines are read the way a bulletin sounds. Fiction is given room to breathe. The extension picks whichever voice suits the page, or you choose one in the settings and it reads everything you open. Two of them talk back. One is an old-timer who mutters what he thinks of what he has just read, clears his throat between paragraphs, and hands the article back when he is done. The other is in her twenties, talks fast, and is thoroughly unimpressed by everything. IT FOLLOWS ALONG The sentence being spoken is highlighted as you listen, and the page scrolls to keep up. Terms the article keeps returning to are picked out as they are read. Nothing on the page is modified — the highlight is painted over it and leaves when you do. IT KNOWS WHAT NOT TO READ Tables, code listings and pasted data make no sense aloud, so they are left out. And you are told, so you know they were there: "I'll skip a table here, three columns and four rows." START ANYWHERE Right-click any paragraph and choose "Read from here". Playback begins at that exact sentence, not at the top of the page. Select text first and it reads just that. Alt+R starts and pauses. A player bar sits at the bottom of the page with skip, speed, and the reader currently talking. YOU CAN SEE WHAT YOU HAVE LEFT The toolbar button opens a tray with three meters: how much of today's allowance is gone, what remains of your welcome words, and any words you have bought outright. Nothing runs out halfway through an article without warning. WHAT IT COSTS Free: 500 words a day, plus a one-time welcome allowance of 6,000 words — about half an hour of listening — so you can hear what it actually does before deciding. Paid: 10,000 words a day, about an hour of listening. $3.99 a week, $12.99 a month, or $129.99 a year. Or buy words outright, with no subscription: from $1.99 for half an hour of listening up to $24.99 for fifteen hours. Bought words never expire, and are only used once the day's allowance is gone. Sign in with Google. Payment is handled by Stripe; your card details never touch this extension. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO It does not run until you ask it to. It has no access to a page until you press the button, use the right-click menu, or press Alt+R on that page. It does not watch what you browse, and the addresses and titles of pages you read are never sent or stored. Two things to watch when pasting: the em dashes (—) and the curly apostrophes should survive a normal copy, but if the dashboard renders them as ? or mojibake, retype those characters rather than leaving them. And the blank-line spacing between sections is deliberate — the store collapses single newlines, so the double breaks are what keep the headings apart.