Type or paste up to 5,000 characters and have your browser read it aloud, with a choice of every installed voice, adjustable speed and pitch, and full playback control. Uses the free, built-in Web Speech API.
Your browser doesn't support the Web Speech API's speech synthesis feature. Try a recent version of Chrome, Edge, Safari, or Firefox.
Text-to-speech (TTS) technology converts written text into spoken audio, and this tool implements it using the Web Speech API's SpeechSynthesis interface — a standard built directly into modern browsers specifically so web pages can access the operating system's own speech capabilities without needing any external service, API key, or network request. When you click Play, the browser hands your text and chosen settings (voice, speed, pitch) to the operating system's speech engine, which generates and plays the audio locally, in real time, entirely on your device.
Unlike a cloud-based TTS service that offers the same fixed set of voices to everyone, the Web Speech API is a thin bridge to whatever speech voices your specific device already has installed — Windows ships its own set through the Windows Speech Platform, macOS and iOS ship Apple's own voice library, and Android ships Google's. Some browsers add their own voices on top (Chrome, for instance, has historically bundled additional Google-provided voices on some platforms), which is why the exact list can vary not just between operating systems but between browsers running on the very same device. This also means voice quality genuinely varies by platform — newer operating systems generally ship more natural-sounding neural voices, while older systems and some Windows configurations still offer more robotic-sounding legacy voices.
The speed control adjusts how quickly words are spoken without changing their pitch, while the pitch control shifts how high or low the voice sounds without changing its speaking rate — the two are independent parameters you can combine freely. For the most natural-sounding result, most people find the default settings (1x speed, default pitch) work best with a good-quality voice; pushing speed too high can make speech hard to understand, while pushing pitch too far from its default in either direction starts to sound noticeably synthetic, since most system voices are tuned and sampled around their natural default pitch.
Pause and resume rely on the browser's own speech queue pausing mechanism, picking back up from exactly where playback stopped rather than restarting — this works reliably in most browsers, though a small number of older or less-compliant implementations occasionally restart from the beginning of the current sentence instead of the exact word. Stop fully cancels playback and clears the speech queue, useful when you want to abandon the current text entirely rather than resume it later. Restart is a convenience that stops any current playback and immediately starts again from the very beginning of your text with your current voice, speed, and pitch settings — useful for re-listening to something you didn't quite catch the first time.
People use browser-based text-to-speech to proofread their own writing by ear (mistakes and awkward phrasing are often much easier to catch by hearing text read aloud than by reading it silently), to make written content more accessible to people with visual impairments or reading difficulties like dyslexia, to consume written articles or documents hands-free while doing something else, and to help language learners hear correct pronunciation of unfamiliar words and sentences. Because it requires no account, no API key, and no internet connection once loaded, it's a genuinely zero-friction way to add audio playback to any piece of text you have on hand.
Text to Speech reads written text aloud using your browser's built-in voices. These related text tools cover other transformations and speech-adjacent tasks.