PS5 text to speech: type in party chat, and how to turn it off
The PS5 has two speaking features. Chat Transcription lets you type in a party and have your words spoken to the others, and the Screen Reader reads menus and on-screen text aloud. Both live in the Accessibility settings, and both are easy to switch on by accident.
This guide follows PlayStation’s support page: how to use each one, how to turn them off, and where character voices fit in when you want funny clips for a stream or a video. Menu names are as in the English console language.
Type in party chat with Chat Transcription
Go to Settings, Accessibility, Chat Transcription and turn on “Enable Chat Transcription”. In a party or a supported game, other players’ voices then appear as text, and what you type is spoken aloud to them. You choose the voice type that represents you, and you must be in a voice chat to use it.
The Screen Reader
The Screen Reader reads on-screen text aloud: turn it on in Settings, Accessibility, Screen Reader. Press the PS button and the triangle button together to pause or resume it, and the PS button and R1 together to start reading from the beginning.
How to turn PS5 text to speech off
If the PS5 suddenly talks, switch off the same options: “Enable Chat Transcription” under Chat Transcription, or the Screen Reader under Screen Reader, both in Settings, Accessibility. When the speech comes from a single game, such as its own narrator, turn it off in that game’s accessibility or audio settings instead.
Character voices for clips and streams
The PS5 only speaks with its own voices. For a stream alert, a montage or a meme in a character’s voice, open a voice in the SuperClonica catalog, type 30 to 100 characters and download the line free, with no account; our guides to OBS and Twitch chat show how to play such voices live. For many lines, the free engine runs on a PC: python -m pip install superclonica-cpu.