Compare Chrome extensions: Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader vs Adobe Acrobat: PDF edit, convert, sign tools

Read Aloud uses text-to-speech (TTS) technology to convert webpage text to audio. It works on a variety of websites, including news sites, blogs, fan fiction, publications, textbooks, school and class websites, and online university course materials.

Read Aloud allows you to select from a variety of text-to-speech voices, including those provided natively by the browser, as well as by text-to-speech cloud service providers such as Google Wavenet, Amazon Polly, IBM Watson, and Microsoft. Some of the cloud-based voices may require additional in-app purchase to enable.

Read Aloud can read PDF, Google Docs, Google Play books, Amazon Kindle, and EPUB (via the excellent EPUBReader extension from epubread.com).

Read Aloud is intended for users who prefer to listen to content instead of reading, those with dyslexia or other learning disabilities, and children learning to read.

To use Read Aloud, navigate to the web page you want to read, then click the Read Aloud icon on the Chrome menu. In addition, the shortcut keys ALT-P, ALT-O, ALT-Comma, and ALT-Period can be used to Play/Pause, Stop, Rewind, and Forward. You may also select the text you want to read before activating the extension. Right clicking on the selected text will provide you with yet another option to activate Read Aloud via the context menu.

To change the voice, reading speed, pitch, or enable text highlighting, go to the Options page either by right clicking on the Read Aloud icon and choose Options, or by clicking the Gear button on the extension popup (you'll need to stop playback to see the Gear button).

Read Aloud is an open-source project. If you wish to contribute bug fixes or translations, please visit the GitHub page at https://github.com/ken107/read-aloud.