Free browser extension · Firefox, Android, Chrome
Open an article or a PDF, press play, and a natural voice reads it to you while every word lights up on the page. The voice lives in your browser, so it keeps working offline and what you read stays yours. No account, nothing to pay.
Firefox · Firefox for Android · Chrome, Brave, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi · coming soon to the add-on stores
Essay · 6 min read
Every evening at dusk, the keeper climbed the spiral stairs to light the lamp. He wrote the weather in a ledger that nobody else would ever read. Wind from the west, visibility good, two boats heading north. The entries are short, but together they make a kind of diary of the sea.
Alba · ENThe tour
Eight short stops, from the first page you open to the notes you keep. Scroll along, or jump straight to the one you're curious about.
Open a page
A long essay, the morning news, a Wikipedia rabbit hole, a PDF from work. Aloud finds the article on the page and quietly leaves out everything around it.
The Bell Rock Lighthouse is the oldest surviving sea-washed lighthouse in the world.[1] It was built between 1807 and 1810 on a reef in the North Sea, eleven miles off the coast of Scotland.[2][3]
References
Menus, ads, cookie banners, share buttons and "you might also like" stay silent.
Citation markers, "edit" links, info boxes and reference lists are skipped, on Wikipedia, WordPress, Substack and many more. Want the references after all? It's one switch.
"About 12 min" counts only what will be read, and the bar shows how long is left as you go.
They open in Aloud's own reader as real pages. Zoom stays sharp, a page counter shows where you are, and your marks are saved into the PDF.
Press play
Click the Aloud button in your toolbar, or press the shortcut. The first time, Aloud downloads its voice, once. After that it starts in a moment, even on a plane.
VVoice
OSettings
AHide the bar
QClose
Press Z to go back a few seconds, and see where that is on the page.
Select a word, right-click and choose Read selection aloud to hear how it's said. Handy when you're learning a language.
Click a sentence and the reading moves there. J turns that on or off, so selecting text never gets in the way.
Hide the bar with A. Bring your pointer to the bottom of the window and it's back, or tap the little handle on a phone.
On Chrome, "back ten seconds" has no shortcut until you give it one in the browser's shortcut settings; the bar's button and Z always work.
Follow along
The sentence being read is shaded right where it sits, and the word inside it is marked as it's spoken. The page glides along with the voice. Scroll off to look at something and Aloud waits for you, then catches up.
A deeper mark on the word being spoken. Pick its colour and how strong it is.
Keep the sentence in view, snap it to the middle, or never scroll at all. F turns following on or off.
Passages you kept keep their colours while Aloud reads over them.
The highlight adapts to the page, so the text under it stays easy to read.
Pick a voice
Every face below is a voice Aloud offers. Click one to hear it. These clips are Aloud's own output, made by the extension itself, not studio recordings.
Click a face to hear that voice.
Hear every voice, by language →
Natural and clear, from German and Russian to Japanese and Korean. It keeps up on an ordinary processor, so it's the voice Aloud reaches for first.
The richest-sounding voices of the three, at their best on a graphics card. Using your graphics card →
Small, quick and happy on a phone. Its "high" quality voices sound fuller and work harder; when one falls behind, Aloud runs extra copies side by side.
| Your setup | Supertonic 3 | Kokoro-82M | Piper |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chrome or Firefox, with WebGPU | quick, in 31 languages | the richest, and faster than speech | fast |
| Chrome or Firefox, processor only | the best voice that keeps up | works, about 3× slower than speech | fastest |
| Firefox for Android | works, but slower than speech on older phones, so it pauses to catch up now and then | too slow | the one to use |
Chrome and Firefox do equally well: what matters is whether the voice can reach your graphics card through WebGPU. Chrome has it on already. Firefox keeps it off for now, and it takes a minute to turn on. Aloud's settings test your machine and tell you which case you're in. Why it's safe, and how to turn it on in every browser →
Aloudabout:config into the address bar, and accept the warning.dom.webgpu.enabled and set it to true. This turns WebGPU on.dom.webgpu.workers.enabled and set it to true. This is the one that matters: Aloud makes its voice in a background worker, and this lets the worker use the graphics card.gfx.webrender.all to true.To undo it, search for the same names and click the reset arrow next to each.
Any language
Aloud works out the language of every paragraph and hands each one to a voice that speaks it. A folded-away translation or a "Translate?" button stays quiet; open one while you listen, and it's read in its turn.
ITC'era una volta un pollo che si chiamava Pollo Piccolino. Viveva in una fattoria insieme alla sua mamma e ai suoi fratelli.
ENOnce upon a time there was a chicken called Chicken Little. He lived on a farm with his mother and his brothers.
ITUn giorno una ghianda gli cadde sulla testa, e il pollo corse dalla volpe.
Translate? a button, and a translation still folded away: not read
HeartKokoro · USSaraKokoro · IT
Female 1Supertonic · FR
Male 1Supertonic · ES
Female 2Supertonic · DEAloud's voice settings in miniature: each language wired to the voice that reads it. Leave a language on Auto, or click a face to choose one yourself.
Italian in an Italian voice, English in an English one, on the same page, without a single click.
Hidden translations, closed sections and buttons dressed up as text are passed over.
Select a single word from another language and hear it in a voice that speaks it. Not sure what a phrase is in? Aloud offers "Read as French" with one tap.
A language you have no voice for is read in English, and named, with a link to its voices. Or have it skipped.
The audio is Aloud's own: Kokoro's Sara and Heart reading this story in Chrome, recorded from the extension.
Settings that show, not tell
Every language you have a voice for, wired to the face that reads it. Click another face and the wire swings over; press its ▶ to hear it first. The last row says who reads every other language, and all 222 voices are a click away.
Keep what matters
Select some text and press K, or pick a colour from the little toolbar. The passage stays highlighted on the page, and it's highlighted again whenever you come back. While Aloud reads, N keeps the sentence you just heard.
Five colours, in either style. Your marks look the way you left them.
Write a line about it and add a tag or two: type one, press Enter, and it's there.
Search everything, or filter by tag, colour, site, today or this week, or just the notes you wrote something on.
Copy them as Markdown, links included, or export everything in one file.
Come back later
Stop in the middle of a sentence and come back tomorrow: Aloud starts at that sentence, checked against the text, so an edited page never sends you to the wrong place.
Everything you stopped part-way through, with how much is left. One click picks it up where you were.
Queue articles for later. They play one after another in the Library, even offline, or on their own page if you'd rather.
Open a PDF from your computer or the web: real pages with figures and columns, sharp zoom, a page counter, and marks saved into the file.
Save a whole article or PDF as one MP3, in your voice and speed, for a walk or a commute. And a sleep timer for reading in bed.
Words heard, time listened and documents finished, by day, site and language. Only what you actually heard counts.
The same speed keys for any video on the web: D faster, S slower, Z and X to rewind and skip, even on Shorts. Remembered per site. Start it with Alt+M.
Yours alone
Not a promise, a design: there is no Aloud server to send anything to. Here's the complete list of what ever touches the network.
A saved article's images stay unfetched until you press Load images, so reopening one tells nobody you're reading it. Aloud only runs on a site when you start it there, or on sites you list yourself.
| Aloud | A typical cloud reader | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the voice runs | In your browser | On the provider's servers |
| What you're reading | Never leaves your device | Uploaded to be spoken |
| Account | None | Usually required |
| Price | Free, all 222 voices | Best voices often on a subscription |
| Without a connection | Works, after one download | Stops |
| Your notes and highlights | On this device, in one backup file | In their cloud |
"A typical cloud reader" describes how hosted text-to-speech services generally work; individual products differ.
Your turn
Install Aloud from your browser's store. It's free, and updates arrive by themselves.
Aloud is in its final checks before the Firefox and Chrome add-on stores. It will be free, with every voice and every feature.
Firefox
Windows, macOS and Linux
Add to Firefox
Coming soon
Firefox Add-ons
Firefox for Android
Phones and tablets, with Piper voices
Add to Firefox for Android
Coming soon
Firefox Add-ons
Chrome, Brave, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi
Any Chromium browser on the desktop
Add to Chrome
Coming soon
Chrome Web Store
No account, and nothing collected: read the privacy policy. Installing opens a short welcome tour. Then open any article, press play, and enjoy the read.