Read Aloud extension: voices, shortcuts and MP3
Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader by LSD Software is one of the most popular text-to-speech extensions. It reads web pages and PDFs aloud in Chrome, Edge and Firefox, and its code is open on GitHub.
This guide shows how to start it and control it from the keyboard, which voices are free and which are premium, where your text goes, and what to use when you want the text saved as an MP3 in a natural voice.
Start reading
Install Read Aloud from the Chrome Web Store, the Edge add-ons store or Firefox Add-ons. Open a page and click the extension button, or select text, right-click and choose to read it aloud. The keyboard shortcuts are Alt + P to play or pause, Alt + O to stop, Alt + comma to rewind and Alt + period to go forward; on a Mac use Option. The gear icon opens settings for the voice, speed, pitch and text highlighting.
Free and premium voices
Standard voices are the ones your browser and operating system already have, so the choice and quality depend on your device. Read Aloud can also use cloud voices from Google Wavenet, Amazon Polly, IBM Watson and Microsoft. According to its listing, some cloud voices may need an in-app purchase, premium voices require signing in with a Google account, and you can connect your own Google Cloud or AWS account instead.
PDFs, books and languages
The Firefox listing says Read Aloud supports PDF files and EPUB books through the EPUBReader extension, in more than 40 languages. Pages with unusual layouts are sometimes read in the wrong order; selecting the text you want and reading only the selection usually helps.
Where your text goes
With a standard voice, the listing says speech is synthesized locally on your computer and the text is not sent to the internet. With a premium voice, the text is sent to their cloud server for synthesis. Keep that in mind for private documents.
Save the text as an MP3
Read Aloud is built for listening in the browser; its listings describe reading aloud, not saving files. To keep an article or a chapter as audio for a walk or the car, voice it with the free SuperClonica engine: install it with python -m pip install superclonica-cpu, save the text as a .txt file and run superclonica --text-file article.txt --voice F2 --lang en --normalize --output article.mp3. It runs offline on an ordinary processor with no character limit, and --normalize keeps every file at the same loudness.
A more natural voice
If the browser voices sound robotic, try the SuperClonica catalog: paste 30 to 100 characters on any voice page and hear it free, without an account, in a few seconds. Ten stock voices, M1 to M5 and F1 to F5, come with the engine at no cost, and you can train your own voice in the studio from a clean 5 to 10 second recording.