Read aloud: have any text read to you, on any device, free

Edge comes with Windows and reads web pages with natural sounding voices for free. Microsoft’s steps:

1. Open the page, then open Settings and more (the three dots), More tools, Read aloud.
2. To hear only part of the page, select the text, right-click it and choose Read aloud selection.
3. Or press Ctrl + Shift + U to start and stop (Cmd + Shift + U on a Mac).

Good to know. Edge also opens PDFs and reads them the same way. Its natural voices need an internet connection; Microsoft says offline mode keeps only a few voices. The Edge app on iPhone and Android has Read aloud too.

Source: Microsoft, Read aloud in Microsoft Edge, read November 10, 2026.

1. On the Review tab, select Read Aloud, or press Ctrl + Alt + Space.
2. Ctrl + Space pauses and plays. Alt + → reads faster, Alt + ← slower.
3. The gear icon at the top right of the controls changes the voice and the reading speed. Select Exit to close it.

Good to know. Read Aloud is in Office 2019, Office 2021 and Microsoft 365 on Windows and Mac, and in Word for iPhone, iPad and Android. Word for the web uses Immersive Reader instead. Outlook uses the same Ctrl + Alt + Space.

Source: Microsoft, Listen to your Word documents, read November 10, 2026.

Narrator is Windows’ full screen reader. It reads everything on screen, menus and buttons included, which is what you need if you cannot see the screen and more than you want for one article. Press Windows key + Ctrl + Enter to turn it on and off.

Good to know. On Windows 11 you can add natural voices to Narrator. Microsoft says they run on the computer itself and, once downloaded, work without an internet connection.

Source: Microsoft, Narrator for accessibility, read November 10, 2026.

1. Choose Apple menu, System Settings, Accessibility, Read & Speak, and turn on Speak selection.
2. Select text in any app and press Option + Esc. Press it again to stop. With nothing selected, your Mac reads what is in the current window.
3. The info button next to Speak selection sets highlighting: words, sentences or both, in the colour you choose.

Good to know. The shortcut can be changed in the same place. On older versions of macOS the section is called Spoken Content instead of Read & Speak.

Source: Apple, Have your Mac speak text that’s on the screen, read November 10, 2026.

1. Open Settings, Accessibility, Spoken Content. Turn on Speak Selection and Speak Screen.
2. To hear part of a page: select the text and tap Speak. In some apps it hides behind the arrow at the end of the menu.
3. To hear the whole screen: swipe down from the top with two fingers. A small controller appears for pausing and speed.

Good to know. Turn on Highlight Content in the same menu to see words, sentences or both light up while they are read, underlined or with a background colour.

Source: Apple, Hear iPhone speak the screen, selected text, and typing feedback, read November 10, 2026.

1. The quick way: select the text, tap More in the menu that pops up, then Read aloud. Google says this works without turning anything on, on text that can be read, like a web page.
2. For anything on screen: open Settings, Accessibility, Select to Speak and turn it on. On Samsung phones it is under Accessibility, Installed apps.
3. Tap the Select to Speak button, then tap or drag over what you want read. Turn on Read in background to keep listening while you use other apps.

Good to know. Google’s Reading mode app (Android 9 and later, phones only) shows a clean page with a play button and lets you change the voice and speed under Audio. It does not read PDFs, email, chats or social media feeds.

Source: Google, Use Select to Speak, read November 10, 2026.

1. Select the time at the bottom right, then Settings, Accessibility. Under Text-to-Speech, turn on Select-to-speak.
2. Hold the Search key and drag over the text, or highlight it and press Search + S.
3. Press Ctrl or Search to stop. On a touchscreen, use the Select-to-speak button near the time.

Good to know. In the Select-to-speak settings, under Highlighting, you can light up each word as it is read and shade the background. For schools, see our Chromebook text to speech guide.

Source: Google, Hear text read aloud on a Chromebook, read November 10, 2026.

1. Right-click the page and select Open in reading mode, or press Alt + Shift + R (Cmd + Option + R on a Mac).
2. Press Play in the side panel. Previous and Next jump by sentence; Playback speed sets the pace.
3. Under Settings, Voice selection picks the voice and Voice highlight lights up words, sentences, or adapts.

Good to know. Google says reading mode downloads Google natural voices for your language and falls back to the system voice if that fails. It does not work on every site: forms, payment pages, video sites and image galleries are left out.

Source: Google, Use reading mode in Chrome, read November 10, 2026.

Open the page in Reader View with the page icon in the address bar, then use its read aloud control to have Firefox read the article out loud. It only works on pages Firefox recognises as articles. Mozilla’s own help page would not load for us on November 10, so this one comes from Mozilla’s support forum, which quotes it.

Source: Mozilla Support forum, read November 10, 2026.

Want a button on every page instead? We compared the permissions of 13 extensions in the best free text to speech Chrome extensions.

Docs has no Read aloud button of its own. Google’s help only describes using it with a screen reader, which you switch on under Tools, Accessibility (or Ctrl + Alt + Zon Windows). In practice, the quickest route is your device’s own reader: Select-to-speak on a Chromebook, Speak selection on a Mac, Speak Selection on an iPhone. Or copy the text into the reader at the top of this page.

Source: Google, Use Google Docs Editors with a screen reader, read November 10, 2026.

1. On Windows, open the PDF in Microsoft Edge and use Read aloud as on any page.
2. In Adobe Acrobat Reader, choose View, Read Out Loud, Activate Read Out Loud (Shift + Ctrl + Y, or Shift + Cmd + Y on a Mac), then pick read this page or read to the end.

Nothing is read? The PDF is most likely a scan: a picture of text with no words inside. Our guide to a scanned PDF that won’t read aloud explains the fix. For a whole book or a long report, PDF to audio turns it into chapters you can download.

Source: Adobe, How to read a PDF aloud, read November 10, 2026.

The free Kindle app has Assistive Reader on iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac and Fire tablets. Press and hold a word and choose Playto start reading from there. Amazon says it works with any Kindle book that has Enhanced Typesetting, in a language your device’s own speech engine supports, and it uses that engine’s voices.

Source: Amazon, How to use the Assistive Reader in Kindle apps, read November 10, 2026.

The first is Microsoft Zira, the classic desktop voice that ships with Windows and that many apps and older readers fall back on. We recorded it on a Windows 10 Pro laptop through Windows’ own speech engine. The other two are FreeTTS voices: the free one the reader above starts with, and the HD version of the same speaker. We matched the loudness of all three, so none sounds better just for being louder.

The point is not that one voice wins. It is that the reader you use decides what you hear: the same Windows computer gives you Zira in an older app and a natural voice in Edge. If a reader sounds robotic, look for its voice setting before giving up on it.

Turn on word highlighting. Mac, iPhone, Chrome’s reading mode, Chromebooks and the reader above can all light up each word as it is spoken. Reading and listening at the same time makes it easier to keep your place. If reading is hard for you or your child, our guide to text to speech for dyslexia goes further.

Change the speed. Most readers start slower than people like once they are used to it. Try 1.25× for articles you know the subject of, and slow down for anything new.

Pick the voice, not just the reader. Every reader here has a voice setting. A natural voice is easier to follow for an hour than a robotic one.

Need it later? Save it. If you want to listen in the car, on a walk or with the screen off, the built-in readers will not help; they only play live. Save an MP3 from the reader above or use the text to MP3 converter.

Every menu, shortcut and limit for the built-in readers is taken from the maker’s own help page, read on November 10, 2026, and each section links to it. We did not try each step on every device: menus change between versions and between phone makers, so if yours looks different, the linked page is the one to trust. Firefox is the exception, as explained above.

We tested the reader at the top of this page ourselves: all 22 voices, in 11 languages, returned audio and word timings as a signed-out visitor on November 10, 2026. It is ours, it is listed first and marked as ours, and its free limits are the real ones.