Reviews for Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader
Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader by LSD Software
63 reviews
- Rated 3 out of 5by bismarck, 3 years ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by Jake Swartwout, 3 years ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 12178744, 3 years 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, 3 years agocan't read or detect text that were scanned like a photo
- Rated 3 out of 5by Robert R., 3 years ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by OneSource, 3 years 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 3 years 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, 3 years 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 3 years 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, 3 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, 3 years ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by BusyB06, 3 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, 3 years agoLa verdad Sirve pero en Chromium no sirve.
En mozilla firefox Si funciona normal. - Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 16396950, 3 years ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 12789847, 4 years ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by sodope, 4 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, 4 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, 4 years agoShould have voice selections. Should have volume control.
- Rated 3 out of 5by 企鹅, 4 years ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by MDTokincam, 4 years ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by R3DL1M3, 4 years ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by Kelly Diaz, 4 years agoThe permission process to use Google Wavenet voices is no longer working. I actually purchased this addon and I'm no longer granted access to premium voices. I feel cheated.
- Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 15174474, 4 years ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by wieland, 4 years ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by Firefox user 10447271, 5 years ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by Igor, 5 years agoBy itself extension works fine, but there is problem when it needs to work together with other extensions, for example, to read text produced by EBUB or FB2 extension.
For example:
1. epub file opened with EPUBReader extension (works fine), but opening resulting page with 'Read Aloud' extension results in the error message:
"missing host permission for the tab".
2. Once again, separately, both extensions work fine, error appear only when data are passed from the first to the second one.