Text to Speech 🔊
Paste any text and listen to it straight away. Free, no sign up, no character limit, and you can download the audio as an MP3.
What people use this for
Proofreading your own writing
Hearing a sentence read back catches clumsy phrasing and missing words that your eyes skip over after the third read.
Voiceovers for videos
Download an MP3 and drop it straight into your editor. No watermark, no attribution requirement, no subscription.
Listening instead of reading
Turn a long article, a set of notes or a chapter into audio for the commute, the gym or the washing up.
Accessibility and dyslexia support
Follow along with the words highlighted as they are spoken, at whatever pace suits you.
Language learning
Hear how a phrase is meant to sound from a native voice, and slow it down until you can follow every word.
Practising a talk
Have your script read back at speaking pace to find out how long it actually runs.
Which voice source should you pick?
| Source | Best for | Speed | Download |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your device | Proofreading, following along while you read | Instant | No |
| Natural | Videos, podcasts, anything someone else will hear | A few seconds | MP3 |
| Offline | Open-source projects, no third party involved | A few seconds | MP3 |
Getting speech that sounds right
- Punctuation is your timing. A comma buys a short pause, a full stop a longer one. Text with no punctuation runs together no matter which voice reads it.
- Spell out what you want said. "Dr." can come out as "doctor" or as "D R" depending on the voice. Write the word you want to hear.
- Slow down before you speed up. Around 0.9× is a comfortable listening pace for anything technical. 1.5× and above is for material you already know.
- Match the voice to the language. An English voice reading French will say the letters, not the words. Change the language first, then pick the voice.
- Break up walls of text. Paragraph breaks become natural pauses, which makes long recordings far easier to follow.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this text to speech tool really free?
Yes. There is no sign up, no daily quota, no watermark spoken over your audio, and no limit on how much you listen to. Downloads are capped at 100,000 characters per file, which is roughly two hours of speech.
Can I use the audio commercially?
The offline voices are Kokoro-82M, released under the Apache 2.0 licence, which permits commercial use. The natural online voices come from Microsoft Edge's reading service and are best treated as personal or draft use; check Microsoft's terms before publishing audio made with them.
Why can I not download the device voices?
Browsers deliberately send speech from the built-in Web Speech API straight to your speakers rather than exposing it as data a page can capture. That is a privacy protection, not a missing feature. Pick one of the downloadable voice sources and the audio is generated as a real MP3 file.
Does my text get sent anywhere?
With the device voices, nothing leaves your browser at all. With the downloadable voices, the text is sent to our server to be spoken, and both the text and the audio are deleted within 30 minutes. Nothing is stored or used for anything else.
How long can the text be?
Playback with device voices has no limit. For downloads, up to 100,000 characters per file. Longer text is automatically split into parts, spoken separately and joined back into one continuous audio file, so you never have to break it up yourself.
What languages are supported?
The natural voices cover over 70 languages and more than 300 individual voices, including regional accents. The offline voices cover English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi, Japanese and Mandarin. Device voices depend on what your operating system has installed.
Why does the audio sound rushed at the joins?
It should not. Long text is split at sentence boundaries, never mid-sentence, so each join lands on a pause that was going to be there anyway. If you hear a join, it usually means the text had a very long sentence with no punctuation to break on.
Can I use this to read PDFs or web pages?
Copy the text and paste it in. The tool cleans up the artefacts that copying usually brings along, such as smart quotes, non-breaking spaces and invisible formatting characters, which otherwise get read aloud or make voices stumble.
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