Text to Speech
Read text aloud using your browser's built-in voices in 100+ languages.
Written by Anil Gautam · Updated
Where do the text to speech voices come from?
The tool uses your browser's speech synthesis and lists every voice it reports, with the language code in brackets, such as en-GB or hi-IN. Next to the Voice label is a count of the voices found, and the first one is selected when the page loads. Voices come from your operating system and browser, so the list changes from one computer to the next.
Some voices run online. In Chrome on Windows and macOS, voices whose names begin with Google are generated on Google's servers, so the text you play is sent there and needs a connection; Edge voices with Online in the name work the same way. The other voices are installed on the device and keep working offline. Nothing you type is uploaded by the tool itself.
How do rate and pitch change the voice?
Both sliders run from 0.5 to 2.0 in steps of 0.1, and 1.0 is the voice's normal setting. Rate multiplies speed: a paragraph that takes 90 seconds at 1.0x takes about 60 seconds at 1.5x and about 180 seconds at 0.5x. Pitch moves the voice higher or lower without changing its speed.
Voice, rate and pitch are locked in when you press Play, so moving a slider during playback has no effect until you press Stop and Play again. Play always starts from the beginning of the text. Pause and Resume carry on from the same spot, and Stop ends playback while your text stays in the box.
Why does a voice skip or garble words?
Match the voice to the language of the text. A voice reads with the rules of the language it was built for, so an English voice given Hindi in Devanagari may skip it or mangle it; choose a hi-IN voice for that text. Punctuation shapes the rhythm too, since most voices pause at commas and full stops, and a long sentence without commas is read in one breath.
Listening to your own draft at 1.0x is a quick way to catch missing or doubled words that the eye skips over. If Play is greyed out, the text box is empty or holds only spaces. A message that the browser does not support speech synthesis means it lacks the Web Speech API; Chrome, Edge and Safari have it. For the reverse direction, Speech to Text Dictation turns your voice into text.