Web novel text to speech: listen to chapters like an audiobook
Web novels run for hundreds of chapters, and many readers follow several at once. Listening lets you keep up on the commute, at the gym or while doing chores, but a flat robotic voice gets tiring long before the arc ends.
This guide shows quick ways to listen in the browser and on the phone, and how to turn whole arcs into MP3 chapters with SuperClonica: natural voices in 31 languages, a free online test and a free engine with no character limit.
Quick ways to listen
For a long series, voice quality matters more than for a short article: you will hear it for hours.
- On an iPhone, Speak Screen reads the open chapter when you swipe down with two fingers from the top.
- On Android, Select to Speak reads what you tap on the screen.
- Microsoft Edge has Read Aloud for whole pages, and Chrome has a reading mode that can read text aloud.
- Some reading apps have their own listen button; when it is missing or stops working, the system tools above still work.
Try a voice for your novel
Paste a line of dialogue of 30 to 100 characters into the page of any voice, choose the language and press Voice it. In a few seconds you hear whether the voice fits your novel, with no account. Try a calm narrator and a livelier voice before you choose.
Prepare the chapters
Keep a short list of name spellings and reuse it for every chapter so the names always sound the same.
- Save each chapter as its own text file and number them, 001.txt, 002.txt and so on, in a folder called chapters.
- Remove translator notes, ads and next-chapter links.
- Write game-style status windows and symbols as words, for example Level twelve instead of [Lv. 12].
- Spell character names the way they should sound if the voice reads them oddly.
A whole arc as MP3
Install the free engine with python -m pip install superclonica-cpu, then run python -c "import glob; from superclonica import Superclonica; tts = Superclonica(); [tts.save(f[:-4] + '.mp3', tts.synthesize(open(f, encoding='utf-8').read(), 'M2', 'en')[0]) for f in sorted(glob.glob('chapters/*.txt'))]". It voices every chapter in the folder and saves 001.mp3, 002.mp3 and so on next to the text files. The engine has no character limit and runs offline, so a whole arc never leaves your computer. Copy the files to your phone and play them in any audiobook or podcast player that remembers the position.
Personal listening and rights
Listening to chapters you can legally read is personal use. Publishing the audio, on YouTube or anywhere else, needs the author’s or publisher’s permission, and many light novels already have official audiobooks. Read official translations where they exist: it supports the authors you follow.