LibreOffice text to speech: read aloud in Writer, Calc and Impress
LibreOffice has no Read Aloud button like Microsoft Word, but a free extension adds one. Hearing your text is one of the best ways to catch typos and clumsy sentences, and it helps when reading on screen is tiring.
This guide shows how to install and use the Read Text extension, when your system’s own screen reader is enough, and how to turn a whole document into an audio file offline.
Install the Read Text extension
Download Read Text from the official LibreOffice Extensions site and add it in LibreOffice under Tools, Extension Manager, then restart LibreOffice. It works in Writer, Calc, Draw, Impress and Web Writer, and it can also read the system clipboard.
Read text aloud
Highlight some text, then choose Tools, Add-Ons, Read Selection, or click the Read Selection button on the toolbar. In Writer you can select several passages by holding Ctrl. To read whatever you copied, choose Tools, Add-Ons, Read clipboard. The extension can use another language or voice and can save the speech as an audio file.
When a screen reader is enough
If you already use a system-wide screen reader, such as Narrator on Windows or VoiceOver on a Mac, you may not need the add-on at all. The extension also writes temporary files to pass text to other programs; its description explains how to clear them if the text is confidential.
A whole document as MP3
For a long document, save it as plain text with File, Save As and the Text format, then voice it offline with the free SuperClonica engine: python -m pip install superclonica-cpu, then superclonica --text-file document.txt --voice F2 --lang en --normalize --output document.mp3. It runs on an ordinary processor, has no character limit and keeps private documents on your computer.
Pick a voice you like
On the page of any voice in the SuperClonica catalog, paste a sentence of 30 to 100 characters from your document and press Voice it to hear how it sounds, free and without an account. The engine speaks 31 languages.