Firefox read aloud: text to speech in Firefox
Firefox can read web pages aloud without any extension. The feature is called Narrate, and it lives inside Reader View, the clean reading mode for articles. It uses the voices of your operating system, so it costs nothing and works offline, but it sounds only as good as those voices.
This guide shows how to start it, what its controls do, where it stops and how to turn an article into natural speech or an audio file with a free offline engine.
Does Firefox have read aloud?
Yes. Open an article and click the Reader View icon in the address bar; it appears on pages that look like articles. In Reader View, click the headphones icon in the toolbar on the left, or press N, then press play. Firefox reads the text paragraph by paragraph and keeps reading when you switch to another tab.
Voice, speed and skipping
The Narrate panel has a speed slider and a voice menu. The back and forward buttons jump to the previous or next paragraph while it is reading. The voice menu lists the speech voices installed in Windows, macOS or Linux, so adding a better system voice, such as a new language pack in Windows, also adds it to Firefox.
Where Narrate stops
It works only in Reader View, so pages that Firefox does not recognise as articles cannot be narrated, and it reads the article text, not menus or comments. The quality depends on the system voices, which on some Linux setups sound robotic. And it plays live only: there is no button to save the speech as an audio file to listen to later.
Natural voices and an audio file
To listen to an article in a natural voice or on the go, copy its text into a file such as article.txt, install the free SuperClonica engine with python -m pip install superclonica-cpu and voice it with one command: superclonica --text-file article.txt --voice F2 --lang en --output article.wav. The engine runs offline on an ordinary processor, reads long texts without a limit, speaks 31 languages and writes a WAV file you can convert to MP3 for your phone. To hear a voice first, any catalog voice page voices a line of 30 to 100 characters free.
Extensions
Add-ons such as Read Aloud add buttons, highlighting and online voices. Before installing one, check what it sends to its servers: online voices mean the page text leaves your computer. Narrate and the offline engine keep the text on your machine.