Text to speech reader: listen to books, PDFs and articles
A text to speech reader reads written text aloud so you can listen instead of reading: a book on a walk, a long article while cooking, notes before an exam, a document you want to proofread by ear. Reading aloud also helps people with dyslexia or tired eyes.
This guide shows how to turn any text, PDF or article into an audio file on your own computer with the free SuperClonica engine and a natural voice from the catalog, offline and without a character limit.
Pick a voice you like to listen to
For long listening, choose a calm, even voice: a narrator or a conversational male or female voice. Listen to the demos in the catalog and try your own sentence on the page of a voice before you download it; some voices are free.
Install the reader
Install Python 3 and the free SuperClonica engine with one command: python -m pip install superclonica-cpu. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux on an ordinary processor, without a graphics card and without an internet connection once the model is downloaded. Put the voice file you downloaded next to your texts.
Read a text file aloud
Save the text as a plain .txt file and voice it with one command: superclonica --text "$(cat book.txt)" --voice narrator.json --lang en --output book.wav. The engine splits long texts at natural pauses, reads them piece by piece and joins them into one audio file you can play on any device.
Read a PDF or an article aloud
The reader takes plain text, so first get the text out of the document.
- PDF: save it as text from your PDF viewer, or use a converter such as pdftotext (pdftotext book.pdf book.txt).
- Web article: copy the text of the article into a .txt file, without menus and comments.
- Word or e-book: export or save as plain text.
- Remove page numbers, headers and footnotes you do not want to hear.
Make it pleasant to listen to
Split a long book into chapters and voice each chapter into its own file, so you can stop and resume easily. Check that abbreviations and unusual numbers are written the way they should be read. Choose the language of the text with --lang; one voice reads all 31 languages of Supertonic 3, but not Chinese yet.
Online test before you install
To hear how a voice reads your kind of text, open its page, paste a sentence of 30 to 100 characters and press Voice it. You can listen and download the recording without an account. Long texts are read by the engine on your computer.