Reviews for Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader
Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader by LSD Software
Review by sodope
Rated 3 out of 5
by sodope, 6 years agoHonestly I use this to help me speed read long books. I will normally have a physical copy in hand and pull up the web version and have Read Aloud running at 1.5x I have to read a lot by virtue of my interests and this helps, but it is certainly more useful for articles and uninterrupted prose like fiction.
I read tech/programming books. I wasn't expecting this to do a good job reading all the symbols and concatenated words but it does a relatively decent job. Some symbols are ignored or not read correctly but that's to be expected.
What's annoying is that the parser for this extension frequently skips single sentences or footnotes that are in between two larger paragraphs. So like if you have one paragraph then a sentence from the next paragraph followed by a diagram then the rest of the paragraph Read Aloud will skip straight from the first paragraph to the larger chunk of the second paragraph. sometimes the skipped part is important so i find myself pausing and rewinding frequently to make sure i got everything. It's jarring when you have a book in hand and read and hear two different things.
Feature suggestion: Consider highlighting the text that is already on the page by default. And having the option to use the modal if the page has funky formatting or something. Is there any reason why you can't just manipulate the DOM to highlight & scroll the words that are already on the page?
I read tech/programming books. I wasn't expecting this to do a good job reading all the symbols and concatenated words but it does a relatively decent job. Some symbols are ignored or not read correctly but that's to be expected.
What's annoying is that the parser for this extension frequently skips single sentences or footnotes that are in between two larger paragraphs. So like if you have one paragraph then a sentence from the next paragraph followed by a diagram then the rest of the paragraph Read Aloud will skip straight from the first paragraph to the larger chunk of the second paragraph. sometimes the skipped part is important so i find myself pausing and rewinding frequently to make sure i got everything. It's jarring when you have a book in hand and read and hear two different things.
Feature suggestion: Consider highlighting the text that is already on the page by default. And having the option to use the modal if the page has funky formatting or something. Is there any reason why you can't just manipulate the DOM to highlight & scroll the words that are already on the page?
1,282 reviews
- Rated 4 out of 5by Danis Barsant, 5 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Mike, 6 days agoMy eyesight is deteriorating and I have found Read Aloud to be a lifeline because it is simple to use, unlike a couple of the more sophisticated/complex key command driven tools that require frequent practising to memorize the commands.
While there are sometimes mispronunciations of known words, the usefulness of the tool far outweighs any disadvantages.
Also, while selecting the voice, I didn't come across any accents that could be identified as truly Canadian, but I have managed to find one that is fairly close. - Rated 5 out of 5by sealchan, 8 days ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Nicolap, 12 days ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 20150530, 14 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 18142561, 16 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 20121652, a month ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by FelixS, a month agoIMPORTANT: Default voice is GARBAGE. For English "GoogleStandard British English (Benjamin)" was very good. You have to give special permission for it to work, which was not super easy. Follow these instructions:
1. Click the permission thing in the settings that show up when you choose this voice.
2. Press the grant permission button.
3. A new page will open. Do NOT press the blue button that says "Try text-to-speech free" or "Start free". Scroll down and press the other blue button that says "Speak it" or similar.
4. Click "I am not a robot" and do a stupid test thing such as clicking on all boxes that contain bridges.
5. Now everything should work and you can close these tabs! - Rated 1 out of 5by kandosh27, 2 months agoLa extensión se salta frases, palabras en muchas paginas, tienes que revisar a mano que se salta
- Rated 1 out of 5by rift, 2 months agorandomly stutters, loads for a minute, then gives up.
skips the first ten words.
can't see short sentences unless highlighted.
worse than useless. - Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 14934088, 2 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 17789734, 2 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by enes, 2 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Syd, 2 months ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by 斗小马, 3 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 14009137, 3 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Pedro, 3 months agoA ferramenta é simples e prática, isso é ótimo, mas eu também adoraria poder mexer na velocidade do texto
- Rated 5 out of 5by PK, 3 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Daniel Vartanian, 3 months agoAmazing! Who needs Speechify when you can use OpenAI voices directly!
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 19908280, 4 months ago