Text to Speech

Text to Speech reads any text aloud using the voices built into your browser and device. Paste an article, an essay you are proofreading, an email or a set of revision notes, choose a voice, and press Play. The sentence being spoken lights up and the current word is marked as it goes, which makes it easy to follow along, spot mistakes by ear or keep your place while you do something else.

The voice list is grouped by language and has a search box, so you can find a British, Indian, Australian or Spanish voice quickly. You can slow the speed down for learning or speed it up to get through a long document, change the pitch and volume, skip forwards and backwards a sentence at a time, or tap any sentence to jump straight to it.

We are open about privacy. Every voice is labelled “On this device” or “Online”. Voices on this device never send your words anywhere. Online voices, which some browsers such as Chrome and Edge include, send the text to the browser maker’s servers to be turned into speech. The tool picks an on-device voice for you whenever one exists.

1. Type or paste into “Text to read”, or press “Open .txt” to load a text file.
2. Choose a voice under “Voice”. Type in the search box to filter by name or language, and press “Hear a sample” to try it.
3. Set “Speed”, “Pitch” and “Volume” under “Sound”. Your choices are remembered for next time.
4. Press “Play”. The same button pauses and resumes, and the arrows skip a sentence back or forward.
5. To hear just part of the text, select it in the box first and press “Read selection”.

• Every voice your browser offers, grouped by language, with search and an “Only voices on this device” filter.
• Clear privacy labels on every voice, and an on-device voice chosen by default when one is available.
• Follow-along highlighting of the current sentence and, where the voice supports it, the current word.
• Play, pause, resume, stop, previous and next sentence, and tap-a-sentence to jump.
• Speed from 0.5× to 2×, pitch and volume controls, with a live word count and reading-time estimate.
• Read just the selected text, open .txt, .md, .srt and .vtt files, paste, or drop a file onto the box.
• Long texts are read in short pieces, which avoids the silent cut-off some browsers hit after about 15 seconds.
• Keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl or ⌘ + Enter to play or pause, Esc to stop.

• Voices differ a lot between devices. Phones and Macs often have high-quality voices you can download in the system settings; Windows has extra voices under Settings, Time and language, Speech.
• Word highlighting depends on the voice. If the voice does not report its position, whole sentences are highlighted instead, and the tool tells you.
• Saving the speech as an MP3 is not possible here. Browsers play their built-in speech straight to the speakers and never give the sound to the web page, so any site claiming to do this with these voices is recording something else.
• On iPhone and iPad, speech only starts after you tap Play, and it may stop if the phone is locked or you switch apps.
• Online voices need an internet connection. If speech stops when you go offline, switch to a voice marked “On this device”.