Text to Speech
Read any text aloud in your browser using the voices installed on your device, with speed and pitch control and no audio sent anywhere.
How to use
- Paste or type the text you want read aloud.
- Choose a voice from those installed on your device.
- Set the speed and pitch to something comfortable.
- Press play, and try a different voice if the pronunciation is poor.
- Use a local voice rather than a network one for anything sensitive.
Frequently asked questions
Where do the voices come from?
From your own device and browser. The Web Speech API exposes whatever voices your operating system provides, which is why the list differs between a Mac, a Windows PC and a phone, and why the same page can sound quite different on each one.
Does my text get uploaded anywhere?
It depends on the voice, and this is worth knowing before pasting anything private. Voices installed locally synthesise entirely on your device with nothing transmitted. Some browsers also offer higher-quality network voices, which send the text to a server to be synthesised. If the text is sensitive, choose a local voice.
Why does it mispronounce names?
Because speech synthesis applies pronunciation rules plus a dictionary, and names frequently follow neither. Proper nouns, loanwords and technical terms are the usual failures. Respelling a word phonetically in the input is the practical workaround, and it works well.
Can I download the audio as a file?
Not directly from the browser speech API, which plays audio rather than producing a file you can save. Producing a downloadable recording requires a dedicated synthesis service or recording software, which is a different and generally paid proposition.
What is this actually useful for?
Proofreading, mainly — hearing your own writing read back catches clumsy sentences, repeated words and missing words that the eye skips straight over. It also helps with getting through long documents, with language learning, and for anyone who takes in spoken text more readily than written.
Is this the same thing as a screen reader?
No, and conflating them understates what a screen reader does. A screen reader is assistive software that navigates an entire interface, announcing headings, links, form controls and structure, and it is driven by keyboard. This reads a block of text aloud. Both use speech synthesis; only one is an accessibility tool.
Why does the voice sound flat on long passages?
Because synthesis works largely sentence by sentence and has limited sense of the paragraph around it, so emphasis and pacing do not build the way a human reader's would. Shorter sentences and clear punctuation give it more to work with and noticeably improve the result.
🔒 This tool runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is uploaded, logged, or stored.