Text to Speech

Paste the text, pick a language and a voice, and press Play. The voice list comes from your operating system and browser, so it differs between a Windows PC, a Mac, an Android phone and an iPhone, and a language only appears if a voice for it is installed. On Windows, extra voices are added under Settings, Time & language, Speech; on macOS under System Settings, Accessibility, Spoken Content. Chrome also offers a few Google network voices when you are online.

Speed runs from half to double the normal rate, and pitch and volume can be adjusted as well. Long texts are split at sentence boundaries into pieces of about two hundred characters and queued one after another; this works around a long-standing Chrome problem where a single long utterance stops silently after about fifteen seconds. While a piece is being read, the word currently spoken is highlighted below the text box in browsers that report word boundaries. Safari and some Android voices do not, so the highlight may lag or stay still.

There is no download button because browsers do not expose the generated audio to web pages; the sound goes straight to your speakers. To keep a recording, use a screen or audio recorder, or a desktop application. Listening is a good way to catch typos, missing words and awkward sentences that your eyes skip over when you proofread.

The text stays in your browser. Only the Google network voices in Chrome send text to Google for synthesis; every other voice is generated on your device.