Text to Speech Player

Paste text and hear it read aloud using Web Speech API. Adjust voice, speed, and pitch in real time.

How to Use Text to Speech Player

1

Enter your text

Type or paste the text you want read aloud.
2

Choose a voice

Select from available voice options and adjust speed.
3

Play the audio

Click play to hear your text spoken by the selected voice.

Tested tool guide Text and writing tools Checked August 16, 2026

What Text to Speech Player does, with a checked example

This tool reads pasted text out loud. It takes the words in the box, hands them to the browser's built-in speech synthesizer, and speaks them through your device's speakers, with controls to switch voice and adjust speaking rate and pitch as it plays. Everything happens on the page: no account, no upload, and no server-side conversion; the voices on offer are exactly what your browser and operating system provide. The thing users most often get wrong: the voice list is not the same everywhere - it comes from locally installed voices, so it changes with every device and browser.

Worked example

A concrete input and expected output from the current implementation.

Input

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Expected output

The sentence is spoken aloud in the currently selected voice, at the current rate and pitch - normal speed and pitch (1.0 in the API) when the controls are untouched. The player shows the utterance playing, with Pause, Resume, and Stop. The result is audio only: no text, transcript, or file is returned.

The tool's only output is sound: it wraps the pasted text in a speech utterance and hands it to the browser's speech synthesizer, which pronounces the words with the selected voice. Rate and pitch change how the sentence sounds, never what it says.

How the result is produced

How the reading works

The pasted text becomes one speech utterance. Its text, voice, rate, and pitch come from the controls, then the page calls speechSynthesis.speak(). The operating system's speech engine renders the words to audio: rate multiplies speaking speed (1.0 is normal), pitch raises or lowers the voice. Pause, Resume, and Stop map to the synthesizer's pause(), resume(), and cancel() calls; an end event fires when the utterance finishes.

Where the voices come from

The voice list is built from speechSynthesis.getVoices(), which lists what the operating system and browser have installed: Apple voices on macOS and iOS, Windows' own set, and Google voices on Android and in Chrome. The list populates asynchronously, so voices can appear a moment after the page loads, and a voice picked here will not exist on another machine.

Good uses

Proof-listen to a draft - an article, email, or script - because hearing it exposes typos and awkward rhythm that silent reading misses.
Absorb a long document without looking at the screen - resting your eyes, cooking, or commuting - at a reading speed you set.
Hear an unfamiliar name, brand, or foreign phrase pronounced before you say it out loud, using a matching voice and a slower rate.

Limits and checks

Pronunciation is never guaranteed: abbreviations, numbers, and proper names are read by whatever rules the voice's engine has, so 'Dr.' can come out as 'doctor' or 'd r', and '5' is usually expanded to 'five'. A voice whose language does not match the text mangles it badly - an English voice will not read French acceptably.
Behavior varies by browser and device. Chrome has a long-standing, widely reported habit of stopping long utterances after roughly 15 seconds of audio, so extended text can cut off mid-sentence. On many mobile browsers audio starts only after a tap, and some embedded webviews have no speech synthesizer at all.
There is no file output. The Web Speech API does not expose the audio it generates, so nothing here can be saved or exported as an MP3 or WAV; the only way to check the result is by ear. For a saved audio file you need a server-based TTS service.

Common questions

Why is the voice list different from the one on my other computer?

Because the page ships no voices of its own. Speech synthesis comes from the operating system and browser on each device - Apple voices on macOS and iOS, Windows' set on Windows, Google voices on Android and in Chrome. Voice names are machine-specific, so a voice you chose on one device will not appear on another.

Can I download the audio as a file, and does my text leave the page?

No to both, with one nuance. The text is processed by the page itself, so it is not uploaded to the site; but the Web Speech API only plays audio and gives no access to the sound it produces, so there is no MP3 or WAV to download here. Chrome's 'Google' voices are the nuance: those are synthesized on Google's servers and need a network connection.

References and verification

The example and behavioral notes were checked against the browser implementation. Standards and primary references below define the relevant format, formula, or platform behavior.