There are millions of people in the United States and Canada who suffer from a myriad of vision disorders. Some of these happen as people get older, diseases or some are just born with it. Luckily, there are a myriad of text to speech reading solutions out there for doing everything from reading web content to books. Today, Good e-Reader is going to look at the best ones out there.
Microsoft Edge Read Aloud
Read Aloud is a simple but powerful tool that reads the text of a web page audibly. It can read your favorite news websites, blogs and even PDF files. To begin, select Read Aloud from the Immersive Reader toolbar. A ribbon toolbar appears at the top of the page after you start Read Aloud. The toolbar includes buttons to play audio,  skip to the next or previous paragraph, and adjust Voice options. Voice options allow you to change the reader’s voice and slow down or speed up their reading pace.
Read Aloud is using Microsoft Azure’s Speech API which depending on the Voice can use a Neural Network to create voices with proper pronunciation
Google Chrome Speech
In 2023 Google started to develop a speech system for Chrome. The voices are pretty terrible, but the entire system is in beta. Chrome is the most popular internet browser, so lots of people use it To get the most value out of it, you want to visit a news site or blog and click view and then reader mode. This will strip away all of the ads and and strip away most of the stuff that makes a good website look pretty. Once Reading Mode is engaged click on the headphones icon on the side bar and it will automatically read the entire article. I tried the system by clicking on view and then just reading an article, and it read the navigation bar, text that was in advertisements etc.
Speechify
Speechify is a mobile, chrome extension and desktop app that reads text aloud using a computer-generated text to speech using AI. Words are highlighted as the text is being read aloud. The main selling points are its versatility and convenience. It can read any text, from books to articles to emails, making it an excellent tool for multitaskers. The free version is limited to just a few voices, the paid one is a bit costly, The premium voices are incredible, with inflections in the speech that mimic natural human voices. The premium version also has offline text to speech, which is useful when travelling.
The Rest
People really like Natural Reader, it has support for most operating systems, but the free version is only limited to 20 hours a day.
Google Android has a Select to Speak system and can be found in the settings under Accessibility. Turn it on and you can have it read text in any app when you either swipe up from the bottom of the screen with two fingers or press both of the volume keys at once, depending on how you configure it.
Amazon recently introduced a text to speech system on the Kindle app for iOS, it is called Assistive Reader. The voice is generic; I don’t think it uses Amazon Polly, which sounds natural, but the typical AI narration seems unnatural. Still, I commend Amazon for targeting people with reading disabilities who have trouble reading. This is the next best thing since Kindle Books are affordable, but audiobooks are expensive. This way, you get the best of both worlds: narration with real-time highlights.
Apple devices have them own solution called Spoken Content. Even if VoiceOver is turned off, you can have iPhone read text on the screen out loud. Have iPhone read the entire screen or a specific selection. Or hear what you type spoken out loud, character by character or word by word.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
