Sometimes text needs to be heard, not read: proofreading an email with fresh ears, checking how a presentation sounds, resting tired eyes, or practising the pronunciation of a language you are learning. Type or paste your words, pick one of the voices already living on your device, set the speed and pitch, and press Speak — your browser does the reading, out loud, on the spot.
The voices are your device's, not ours
This page uses the speech synthesis built into your browser and operating system — the same voices your screen reader and voice assistant use. That design is deliberate. It means the list of voices is whatever your device offers: most phones and computers ship with several, in several languages, and the quality ranges from robotic to remarkably human depending on the voice you pick. It also means your text is never uploaded anywhere: there is no server turning it into audio, no recording is made, and nothing is stored. For built-in voices the speech is generated entirely on-device and even works offline; a few browsers offer extra “online” voices that stream from their own maker, and those are labelled in the voice list by the browser itself.
Speed and pitch
Speed runs from half pace (0.5×) to double (2×) — slow a passage down to catch pronunciation, or speed a long document up once you know the voice. Pitch shifts the voice up or down between 0 and 2 without changing who is speaking; small moves around 1 sound most natural, and the extremes are there for fun and for characters in a story. Long texts are best pasted in a few paragraphs at a time: some browsers pause or cut off very long speeches, an honest limitation of the built-in engines rather than of this page.
Browser support, honestly
Current versions of Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox all speak, on desktop and mobile, though the exact voice catalogue differs by device and some browsers only load the voice list after the first Speak press — if the menu shows only the default, press Speak once and open it again. If a browser has no speech synthesis at all, the Speak button tells you so instead of failing silently. Nothing about your text changes either way: it stays in the box, on your device, until you close the tab.
Worked example
The box opens with two sentences about this very tool — 84 characters. Press Speak with the defaults and your device's default voice reads them at normal speed and pitch. Drag Speed down to 0.5 and press Speak again to hear the same words at half pace, then try Pitch at 1.5 for the same voice shifted noticeably higher.
How to use this tool
- Type or paste the text you want to hear into the box.
- Open the Voice menu and pick a voice — press Speak once first if the list is still loading.
- Set Speed: below 1 to slow down for pronunciation, above 1 to skim a long text.
- Set Pitch near 1 for natural speech; move it only for effect.
- Press Speak to listen, and Stop at any time — then edit the text and speak it again.
Proofreading by ear
The single most valuable use of this page is hearing your own writing. Eyes glide over the missing word, the doubled “the”, the sentence that runs out of breath — ears catch all three, because the voice reads what is actually on the page rather than what you meant to write. Read every important email, application and speech aloud once through a voice at normal speed before it leaves you; the errors it surfaces are precisely the ones a recipient would have stumbled over silently.