Reviews for Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader
Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader by LSD Software
45 reviews
- Rated 3 out of 5by Toni, 3 months agoWorked beautiful for months, now choppy. Will start reading and then stop. Tried everything to correct, updated my browser, reinstalled the addon...same result. Disappointed, need to stop wasting my time and install another tool.
Edit - tried other text to speech apps available thru firefox, they were awful. Back and hoping the issue will disappear. - Rated 3 out of 5by Display Name, 6 months agoFeature requests/suggestions
1. Most desired/important:
a. Please code it so speech doesn't stop when adjusting the speed during playback
b. Please add keyboard shortcuts to increase and decrease speed
2. Helpful:
a. Please allow users to set their own custom keys for the keyboard shortcuts
b. Please allow users to mark their preferred voices as 'Favorites' and group all favorites on the top of the drop-down list.
c. Please add keyboard shortcuts for changing the current voice to other voices added to the user's favorites
e.g.,
Voice1: Alt/Option + 1
Voice2: Alt/Option + 2
etc.
OR
Next favorite voice: Alt/Option + ]
Previous favorite voice: Alt/Option + [ - Rated 3 out of 5by Shivaa212, 6 months ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by Minecraftchest1, a year agoWorks ok, but requires using the google assistant voice which I don't like if I don't pay.
- Rated 3 out of 5by Hossein, a year ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 13549919, a year agoThere 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
- Rated 3 out of 5by Esteeve, a year agoThough it works fine (mostly anyway), The interface is rather bland and unattractive. And the stop button does not work.
- Rated 3 out of 5by bismarck, a year ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by Jake Swartwout, a year ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 12178744, a year agoit'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.
- Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 17014763, a year agocan't read or detect text that were scanned like a photo
- Rated 3 out of 5by Robert R., a year ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by OneSource, a year agoIt 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 a year 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 - Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 12648956, a year agoStarting 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 a year 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. - Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 13948774, 2 years agoit 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.
- Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 13677095, 2 years ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by BusyB06, 2 years agoIt 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. - Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 16759378, 2 years agoLa verdad Sirve pero en Chromium no sirve.
En mozilla firefox Si funciona normal. - Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 16396950, 2 years ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 12789847, 2 years ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by sodope, 2 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? - Rated 3 out of 5by Jeff, 2 years agoOverall, 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.
- Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 16079845, 3 years agoShould have voice selections. Should have volume control.