Text to Speech Reader

Most free text-to-speech tools online do exactly one thing: press play, hear a voice, nothing else. There's no way to see where the reader currently is in a long document, no way to jump back to a specific sentence without restarting from the top, and no visibility into whether the voice being used is processing entirely on your device or quietly sending your text to a cloud provider to generate the audio.

This tool addresses all three. As each sentence is spoken, it's highlighted in the displayed text — the same following-along effect as karaoke captions — so you can track your place in a long document by ear and eye simultaneously. Click any sentence directly and playback jumps there immediately, which turns this from a simple "read it all" tool into something genuinely useful for proofreading or reviewing a specific section without restarting.

The honesty detail most TTS tools skip: browser voices aren't all equal. Some run entirely on-device ("local"), while others — including some of Chrome's higher-quality voices — send the text to a network voice provider like Google to synthesize the audio, meaning that text does leave your device. This tool reads the standard `localService` flag every browser exposes per voice and clearly labels each one "Local" or "Network" in the voice picker, with a warning shown whenever a network voice is selected, so you can choose based on what you're comfortable with rather than finding out after the fact.

Bionic Reading mode is an independent bonus feature: it visually bolds roughly the first 40% of each word's letters, a technique some readers find helps the eye move through text faster by anchoring recognition on the leading letters. It works with or without audio playback running, as a pure text-rendering option.