Read Any Ebook Aloud

How to use it

1. Drop an ebook or PDF on the box above.
2. Pick a voice and speed, then press Play.
3. Click any sentence to jump there. Close the tab whenever you like; next time you open the same file, it picks up where you stopped.

Which voices you get

This page uses the speech engine built into your browser and operating system, so the voice list depends on your device. The best ones by platform:

• Microsoft Edge on any platform lists dozens of "Online (Natural)" neural voices. These are the most natural-sounding free voices available in a browser.
• Chrome on desktop includes several "Google" voices. They're good quality, but they need an internet connection.
• Safari on iPhone, iPad, and Mac uses the system voices. Download the "Enhanced" or "Premium" versions under Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → Voices, then reload this page.
• Android uses Google's speech engine. Higher-quality voices can be installed in Settings → Accessibility → Text-to-speech.

Voices that match the book's language are listed first, with the natural-sounding ones at the top.

Read aloud vs. making an audiobook file

This page speaks live. It starts instantly and costs nothing to download, but there's no file at the end: browsers don't let web pages record their built-in voices. If you want MP3s to put on a phone, play in the car, or listen to offline, use EPUB to Audiobook. It runs a neural voice model on your device and saves each chapter as an MP3. It takes longer and needs a one-time model download, but you keep the result.

Who this is for

• Dyslexic readers and people with low vision. Hearing the text while following the highlighted sentence is a proven reading aid, and it works on any DRM-free book.
• Language learners. Slow the speed down and click back a sentence as many times as you need.
• Proofreading your own writing. Hearing a manuscript read back catches repeated words and clumsy sentences your eyes skip over.
• Long PDFs you don't have time to sit and read: reports, papers, and course readers, while you do something else.

Private by design

The file is opened inside this tab and never uploaded. The only thing stored is your reading position (chapter and sentence number) in this browser's local storage, so the page can resume. The book's text is not stored. One caveat: some cloud voices (Chrome's "Google" voices and Edge's "Online" voices) send each sentence to the browser maker's speech service to be spoken. If that matters for a document, choose a voice without "Google" or "Online" in its name. Those run entirely on your device.

Common problems

• It reads nothing from my PDF. Scanned PDFs are pictures of text. Run the file through Searchable PDF first to add a text layer, then open it here.
• It stops when I lock my phone. Mobile browsers pause web speech in the background. Keep the screen on, or make an audiobook file, which plays normally with the screen off.
• Page numbers or headers are read out in a PDF. PDFs store running headers as ordinary text. Skip them with the → button, or convert the PDF with PDF to EPUB first for a cleaner text flow.
• The voice list is empty. Some Linux browsers ship without a speech engine. Install speech-dispatcher, or use Chrome or Edge.

Frequently asked questions