Hover to read from here
Point at a paragraph, get a play control in the margin, and the voice starts at that sentence rather than at the top of the article.
Browser extension · no account needed
A text to speech extension that reads the page you are on
No copying, no second tab, no pasting an article into a box. The Lumotext extension puts a small player on the page itself and reads it aloud, marking every sentence and word as it goes.
Free on the Chrome Web Store, and it works signed out. An account only syncs your library.
In the page
Text to speech where you are already reading.
The friction in most text to speech extensions is the trip out of the page: select, copy, switch tab, paste, press play, lose your place. Lumotext stays where you are. A compact player mounts on the page on demand. It does not load itself onto every site you visit, and reads the article in place, with the paragraph, sentence and word all lit as the voice moves through them.
Hover any paragraph and a play control appears in the margin; click it to start reading from that sentence. Open immersive mode and the page is reduced to the article itself, no navigation, no sidebar, no related-stories rail, in a clean column you can resize. Your place is remembered per page, so coming back to a long piece tomorrow picks up where the voice stopped.
It works on ordinary articles and on the awkward ones: Google Docs, Gmail threads, Wikipedia articles scoped to the article body rather than the reference list, and the chat interfaces people now read as much as anything else. The extension needs no account at all; signing in only adds a library synced with the web app.
Availability: the extension is published on the Chrome Web Store and free to install. The web app does everything except read a third-party page in place, and needs no install at all.
The player mounts on the page you are already on. Nothing loads until you ask for it.
In the extension
What the player does once it is on the page.
Immersive mode
Pulls the article out of the page and reads it in a clean column, with a size control and no surrounding clutter.
Side panel or on-page controls
Keep voice and speed settings in the browser side panel, or bring them back onto the page, whichever you prefer.
Nothing loads until you ask
The player mounts on demand rather than on every page you open, so the browser is not carrying it around all day.
Handles the awkward sites
Google Docs, Gmail threads and Wikipedia get proper handling instead of reading the navigation and the footnotes at you.
No account required
Install it and press play. Sign in only if you want a synced library and a saved place across devices.
Step by step
How to read a web page aloud in your browser.
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Add it to Chrome
Install it free from the Chrome Web Store. It asks for no account and reads nothing until you press play.
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Open any article
Click the Lumotext icon to bring up the player. Nothing loads on a page until you ask for it.
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Press play, or hover a paragraph
Read the whole article from the top, start from the paragraph under your cursor, or switch to immersive mode for a clean column.
FAQ
Extension questions, answered.
Is the Chrome extension available yet?
Yes. It is published on the Chrome Web Store and free to install. It works fully signed out; an account only adds a library synced with the web app.
Does the extension need an account?
No. It works fully signed out. An account only adds a library synced with the web app and a reading position that follows you between devices.
What about Firefox?
A Firefox build exists but is not shipping. Firefox’s speech engine produces an audible pop at the end of every spoken sentence, and there is no way to suppress it from inside an extension. Shipping something that clicks after every sentence would be worse than not shipping it.
Does it send the pages I read to a server?
No. The page text is processed in the browser and spoken by your system’s voices. Nothing about what you read is transmitted to us, the privacy policy states exactly which network requests exist and why.
Will it read a PDF open in the browser?
For PDFs, use the web app’s PDF reader. It renders the real pages and draws the highlight over them, which an in-page player cannot do.
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.