Highlight Reader — Read Aloud, Highlight on the Page

Reads any web page aloud and highlights each sentence on the page as it goes. Free voices, no account, nothing leaves your browser.

Reads any web page aloud and keeps the highlight on the page — not in a side panel. WHAT IT DOES • Select some text and click the toolbar icon, and it reads from there. Right-click gives you "Read aloud from here" as well. There is also a keyboard shortcut, Alt+Shift+R by default — Chrome does not always assign it, so if nothing happens you can set it yourself at chrome://extensions/shortcuts. • The sentence being read is highlighted on the page itself, so your eyes and ears stay in the same place. The page scrolls along when the next sentence is out of view. • Speed, voice and highlight colour are one click away in the popup. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO • No account, no sign-up, no analytics, and this extension has no server of its own. It speaks with the voices Chrome already offers you. Chrome groups those into on-device voices, which never leave your computer, and network voices (they have "Google" in the name), which are synthesised by their provider — choosing one means Chrome sends the text being read to that provider. The voice list says which is which, and the extension tells you when a network voice is selected. • It installs without access to your websites. It only touches the tab you are on, at the moment you ask it to read, and only to find the text, draw the highlight and scroll it into view. It never changes the page's text, and it adds no content of its own. WORD-BY-WORD HIGHLIGHT (PRE-ORDER) The voices are free and stay free — including Chrome's network voices, which already sound natural. What is planned as a paid add-on is word-level highlighting together with a natural voice: the voices Chrome hands an extension report only the start and end of each utterance, so this version moves the highlight a sentence at a time. Whether the highlight can follow each word depends on the voice reporting where each word begins, and we have not yet verified a voice that does. One payment of $4.99 would cover word-level highlighting, no pause between sentences, and more languages, for 150,000 characters of cloud narration — about 25,000 words, a short book — read whenever you like within twelve months. Cloud voices bill per character, so that number is a real ceiling rather than a formality. No automatic renewal, and a full refund at any time before it ships. No date is promised. Sentence highlighting and Chrome's own voices stay free. The buttons in the popup open our website; nothing is charged from inside the extension. WHAT IT CANNOT READ Text inside an iframe that comes from another site (embedded posts, some comment widgets) is not picked up. Frames from the same site, and web components that keep their text in an open shadow DOM, are read as of version 1.0.1. Chrome's own pages and the Web Store cannot be read at all — that is a browser rule, not a choice. PRIVACY This extension collects nothing and sends nothing anywhere itself. Your settings (speed, voice, colour) are kept in Chrome's own sync storage. There is no backend and no third-party code. The one exception is named above and is yours to make: picking a network voice means Chrome sends that text to the voice provider.