Read Aloud ExtensionRead Aloud Extension at a Glance
Everything the extension does and does not do, in one table.
| What it is | A free Chrome extension that reads web pages, selected text and PDFs out loud, highlighting the sentence and the word being spoken. |
|---|---|
| Price | Free. No account, no trial, no usage limits. |
| Works in | Google Chrome 105 or newer on Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS (desktop). |
| Reads | The main article of a web page, text you select, and PDFs that have a text layer, including PDF files from your computer. |
| Does not read | Google Docs (its text is drawn on a canvas), scanned PDFs without a text layer, text inside embedded frames, Chrome's own pages and the Chrome Web Store. |
| Skips | Menus, sidebars, footers, cookie notices and hidden elements, so reading starts at the article. |
| Voices | The text to speech voices available in Chrome and the operating system: Google cloud voices (marked ☁) and offline system voices. On Auto, the page language is detected and matched to a voice. |
| Speed and pitch | Speed from 0.5× to 3× (Google cloud voices up to 2×). Pitch from 0.5 to 1.5. |
| Highlighting | Current sentence and current word, in five colors or switched off. Adapts to dark pages. |
| Ways to start | Toolbar button, Alt + click on any paragraph, right-click menu (read selected text, read from here, read a PDF), keyboard shortcut. |
| While reading | A small player on the page: previous and next paragraph, play and pause, speed. Reading continues when you switch to another tab. |
| Where to start | Choose to start at the top of the page, at the first visible paragraph, or at the first paragraph after the headline. |
| Interface languages | 52 languages. |
| Privacy | No account and no server. Page addresses, page text, selections and PDF contents are never sent to the developer. Google cloud voices receive the sentence being spoken from Chrome. Anonymous usage counts (for example, how often reading starts) are sent to Google Analytics without page addresses or text. |
| Permissions | Text to speech (to speak), storage (settings), context menus (right-click items), scripting (to work in tabs opened before installation), access to all sites (to read the page you ask it to read). |
| Not affiliated with | Google or any text to speech service. |
Install from the Chrome Web Store. Questions and bug reports: help and feedback. Data handling in detail: privacy policy.