Fanfic text to speech: listen to AO3 and Wattpad stories
Long fics are easier to finish when you can listen on a walk, at the gym or with your eyes closed. Fanfiction sites are plain web pages, so any read-aloud tool works on them, but the flat robotic voices that come with phones and browsers wear you out after a chapter or two.
This guide shows the quick ways to listen to a fic and how to turn whole chapters into audio files with SuperClonica: natural voices in 31 languages, a free online test and a free engine with no character limit.
Quick ways to listen right now
On AO3 the Download button saves a work as EPUB, PDF, HTML, AZW3 or MOBI, which is handy for listening offline.
- On an iPhone, Speak Screen reads the open page when you swipe down with two fingers from the top.
- On Android, Select to Speak reads what you tap on the screen.
- In Microsoft Edge, Read Aloud reads the whole page, and Chrome has a reading mode that can read text aloud.
- If a site or app stops reading, these system tools still work, because they read the screen itself.
Try a natural voice online
Paste a line of dialogue of 30 to 100 characters into the page of any voice, choose the language and press Voice it. In seconds you hear how the voice handles your fic’s tone, with no account.
Whole chapters as MP3 files
Choose a voice that fits the narrator: a calm voice for slow burns, a lively one for crack fics.
- Copy the chapter text without the author’s notes, tags and comments, or keep the notes if you want to hear them.
- Replace scene-break symbols such as *** with a short sentence or an empty line.
- Spell out names the voice reads oddly, for example Hermione as Her-my-oh-nee.
- Long sentences with dashes and ellipses get short pauses, which suits dialogue.
Make the text sound right
Paste a chapter into chapter1.txt, install the free engine with python -m pip install superclonica-cpu and run superclonica --text-file chapter1.txt --voice F2 --lang en --normalize --output chapter1.mp3. The engine has no character limit and runs offline on your computer, so a 5,000-word chapter becomes roughly half an hour of audio without uploading the story anywhere. Number the files by chapter and play them in any music app.
Respect the author: podfic and sharing
Listening to a fic yourself is personal use. Posting an audio version, which fandom calls podfic, is a different matter: ask the author first or check whether their profile grants blanket permission for podfic, and credit them. Catalog voices are marked by type, and parody voices are labeled as parody.