Text to speech

Natural voices, MP3 download.

Looking for the speech to text?

Your text and settings are saved on this device.

Runs in your browser. Nothing uploaded.

How to read text aloud

  1. Paste or type your text into Text.
  2. Pick a Voice. The natural voices come first and can be downloaded; your device's own voices are listed after them and can be played. Set the Speed, and the Pitch for device voices.
  3. Press Play. Pause holds your place and Resume carries on from there. Stop ends the reading so the next Play starts from the top.
  4. Press Download MP3 to save it with the natural voice you picked.

Why the natural voices sound real

The natural voices come from Kokoro, an open AI speech model trained on real recordings. Instead of joining sounds together the way older computer voices do, it predicts how a person would say the whole sentence: where to breathe, which words to stress and how the pitch rises and falls. The result sounds close to a person reading, and it’s made right here in your browser, so there’s no account, no daily limit and nothing is uploaded.

The voices built into your device, such as Microsoft David or Apple’s Samantha, are listed after the natural ones. They start instantly and work offline, but they sound more robotic and can only be played, not saved.

Getting natural-sounding speech

  • Pick a natural voice for anything people will listen to. Heart and Michael are good all-rounders; Emma and George read with a British accent.
  • Match the voice to the language. The natural voices read English. For other languages, choose a device voice whose name includes the language code, such as fr-FR or de-DE.
  • Use punctuation. Commas and full stops are where voices pause and change tone. A long block without them is read as one breathless sentence.
  • Write things the way you want them said. Voices guess at abbreviations, symbols and numbers. “Doctor” is safer than “Dr”, and “about 20 percent” than “~20%”.
  • Start at 1.0×. That’s the voice’s normal pace. Slow it down for language practice or speed it up for skimming.

Ways people use it

Hearing your own writing read back is one of the easiest ways to proofread. Missing words, repeated words and clumsy sentences stand out by ear when your eyes skip straight past them.

It also helps with language learning, with resting your eyes on long articles and with anything that’s easier to follow by ear. For a PDF, copy its text out with PDF to text and paste it here.