Guide · free, no account
How to read any web page aloud in Chrome
A voice reading the page you are already on does two different jobs depending on what you need from it. It can set the pace while your eyes stay on the text, or it can turn an article into forty minutes of listening. Both run from the same player.
No account needed to start. Reading happens on your device.
The idea
Reading is not slow. Losing your place is.
The obvious response to having too much to read is to read faster, and it is the wrong one. Past a certain point on dense material, speed-reading techniques trade comprehension away roughly in proportion to the words per minute they buy. The ceiling is real.
What is not a ceiling is everything you lose to drift. You read four paragraphs cleanly, something reminds you of an unrelated task, and your eyes carry on for two more sentences while your attention does not. Then you have to find the last line you actually processed, which takes ten seconds and costs you the thread of the argument. That cycle, repeated, is where the reading hours go.
A voice fixes the part of that which is fixable. It sets a pace you did not choose, so the micro-pauses that turn into drift are discouraged, and it makes drift visible almost immediately rather than a paragraph and a half later. Add a marker showing exactly which word is being spoken and the second half of the problem goes too: you look back, your eye lands on the lit word, and you are reading again.
Install it, press play, that is the whole setup
Add the extension to Chrome, open any article, and press the toolbar icon or Alt+Shift+S. A small player appears on the page itself and starts reading. There is no copying, no second tab and no account.
If you would rather bring the text somewhere instead, the web app takes pasted text and imported files and reads them with the same controls.
Reading along, or listening instead
These are two different activities and it is worth knowing which one you are doing, because the settings that suit them are not the same.
Reading along means your eyes stay on the page and the voice is a metronome. Here the marker matters more than the voice: three levels are lit at once, the paragraph you are in, the sentence being spoken, and the individual word, so looking away costs you nothing. Speeds between 1.1× and 1.4× suit familiar material; slow down for something you are working through for the first time.
Listening instead means the page is playing while you do something else at the same desk. Here the voice quality matters and the marker does not. Turn the highlight down, push the speed up, and let it run.
The useful part is that you can switch mid-document without losing your position. Follow along through the dense section, then let it run through the part you already know.
Anything you can read becomes something you can listen to
This is the flexibility that makes it worth installing rather than a novelty. The same player handles the article you are on, a PDF you were sent, an EPUB you own, a markdown file, or text you pasted in. A forty-page paper becomes ninety minutes of audio you can work through the way you would an audiobook, except that the text is right there when you want to go back and check a figure.
Documents keep their shape while this happens. A PDF is rendered as its real pages rather than flattened into a column of text, so the figure, the table and the page number stay where the author put them and you can still cite a page and a line. An EPUB opens chapter by chapter in spine order.
Your position is kept per document, so a long report survives being closed. Twenty things half-read is a normal state and the library expects it.
The controls worth knowing on day one
Three of them account for almost all of the difference between this being useful and being a novelty.
- Click a sentence to read from there. The most useful control in the product and the least signposted. Re-reading a dense paragraph is one click rather than scrubbing an audio bar. Hovering a paragraph in the extension puts a small play control in the margin beside it.
- Set your speed deliberately, once. Do it while reading something representative rather than something easy. Almost nobody arrives at the right number by accident.
- Immersive mode. One key strips the navigation, the sidebar, the cookie banner and the related-stories rail, and leaves the piece you came for in a clean column at the size you actually want.
What it does not send anywhere
The speech is produced on your own machine, by the voices your operating system already ships with. There is no request carrying the text, which means nothing about what you read leaves the browser and there is no per-minute cost for anyone to recover. That is the reason there is no character quota and no card.
It matters most for the reading that is not an article: a contract, a medical letter, an unpublished manuscript, anything with your employer's name on it. The privacy policy lists every network request the product makes and why it exists.
One honest caveat. A few voices your browser offers are synthesised online by the browser vendor rather than on your machine. Those are labelled in the voice picker rather than hidden, so the choice is visible. If you are reading something confidential, pick a local voice.
What it cannot do
Reading does not continue on a phone with the screen locked. That is a restriction of mobile browsers rather than a missing feature, and it is exactly why the iPhone and iPad app is being built. On a laptop it keeps going.
A scanned PDF with no text layer has nothing to read. If you cannot select the text in a normal PDF viewer, it needs optical character recognition first, which is not something this does.
DRM-protected EPUBs will not open, and code blocks are shown but never spoken, which makes technical documentation readable rather than maddening.
FAQ
Questions people actually ask
Do I need an account?
No. Reading works signed out in both the extension and the web app, with no character limit. An optional free account adds a library that syncs between them and keeps your place in each document.
Is there a word or character limit?
No. The speech is produced by your own computer rather than on a server, so there is no per-minute cost to meter. A four-hundred-page book costs the same as a paragraph, which is to say nothing.
Can it read a PDF aloud?
Yes, in the web app, and it renders the real pages rather than extracting the text into a column. See reading PDFs aloud for how the highlight is drawn over the page layout.
Why does it sound robotic?
Because of which voice is selected, not the tool. The default is usually the oldest, smallest voice on your machine. Installing the free premium voices takes about two minutes and is the single biggest improvement available.
Start reading in the next minute.
Paste something in and press play. No email, no account. Sign in later if you want it saved.
Free to use. An optional free account syncs your library across devices.