Reviews for Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader
Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader by LSD Software
43 reviews
- by Minecraftchest1, 4 months agoRated 3 out of 5Works ok, but requires using the google assistant voice which I don't like if I don't pay.
- by Hossein, 5 months agoRated 3 out of 5
- by Firefox user 13549919, 6 months agoRated 3 out of 5There are plenty of websites that will read text aloud so I thought this would be about that quality. The voice is awful. Like really bad. It technically does the job so 3 stars but I'd sooner just end up copying the text into a site without a terrible voice. It's like a beta Microsoft Sam from Windows 3.1 circa 1992
- by Esteeve, 6 months agoRated 3 out of 5Though it works fine (mostly anyway), The interface is rather bland and unattractive. And the stop button does not work.
- by bismarck, 8 months agoRated 3 out of 5
- by Jake Swartwout, 9 months agoRated 3 out of 5
- by Firefox user 12178744, 9 months agoRated 3 out of 5it's good tool but still need some work on control. still stuck when I try to reread a previous paragraph. then after that none of the buttons work. it just stuck and keep reading.
- by Firefox user 17014763, 10 months agoRated 3 out of 5can't read or detect text that were scanned like a photo
- by Robert R., 10 months agoRated 3 out of 5
- by Firefox user 16987569, 10 months agoRated 3 out of 5Version 1.45
The add-on says: "You need to grant additional permissions to enable Google Translate voices." But when you click at the underlined "permissions", it leads nowhere. - by OneSource, 10 months agoRated 3 out of 5It is kind of sad that Firefox, unlike Microsoft Edge, needs an extension to read text on a page. That is one of my top 10 reasons why I use Edge in the first place.
Developer response
posted 10 months agoHello OneSource, please give Firefox a 3-star rating for not having built-in TTS, rather than the addon that's trying to make up for its deficiency - by Firefox user 12648956, a year agoRated 3 out of 5Starting off with the default voice I felt it will be a 1 star rating. I went through many voice options and they are pretty much all robotic and of low sound quality. The real slap in the face occurs when selecting a Google standard voice, you need to grant extra permissions which is fine and you are redirected to Google's text to speech site (https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/#put-text-to-speech-into-action)
The voice on the Google site (wavenet-d) is what most people would enjoy, very natural and of high sound quality BUT it is not what you then using this addon.
This addon does what it says on the tin, >eat bean every day 8-/
Fad/FartDeveloper response
posted 10 months agoHi there, Google charges $16/million characters for Wavenet voices. Going through that permission process is the only way to get it for free, albeit for a limited time. This text-to-speech technology is still very new, that's why Google and others charge a lot of money for it. But we expect it will become a commodity in the future. Microsoft Edge indeed already provides some very high quality TTS voices for free with its browser. - by Firefox user 13948774, a year agoRated 3 out of 5it works but its super buggy. sometimes when i skip a paragraph it highlights the paragraph beneath it. and sometimes when i press stop it continues talking.
- by Firefox user 13677095, a year agoRated 3 out of 5
- by BusyB06, a year agoRated 3 out of 5It didn't work properly for me. It highlighted text one paragraph below of what it was actually reading. When it jumped to the next paragraph, the text it was reading disappeared upwards. I could only pause it but not stop. The stop button made it move to the next paragraph. It would not stop until I disabled it completely.
It needs elocution lessons. Especially on place names: Yorkshire is not pronounced "yorksheer" not even in American English. - by Firefox user 16759378, a year agoRated 3 out of 5La verdad Sirve pero en Chromium no sirve.
En mozilla firefox Si funciona normal. - by Firefox user 16396950, a year agoRated 3 out of 5
- by Firefox user 12789847, 2 years agoRated 3 out of 5
- by sodope, 2 years agoRated 3 out of 5Honestly 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? - by Jeff, 2 years agoRated 3 out of 5Overall, it's not a bad app. However there are quite a few mispronunciations and some are so bad they leave you scratching your head. For example, the current Dem. Candidate for President is not "bih-den" but instead "bahee-den" and there are many far worse than this.
- by Firefox user 16079845, 2 years agoRated 3 out of 5Should have voice selections. Should have volume control.
- by 企鹅, 2 years agoRated 3 out of 5
- by MDTokincam, 2 years agoRated 3 out of 5