About Aloud

Aloud began with a small annoyance: the quickest way to find out whether a piece of writing works is to hear it, and doing that on the web usually meant an account, a word quota and a card on file, for a job the browser can already do by itself.

One script, three modes

Every browser ships a speech engine and a set of voices that most people never use. Aloud puts a proper interface on it, and then notices that three separate tools want exactly the same screen: a large legible script, a transport, a speed control and a position marker.

• Listen reads your text aloud, with a marker that follows the words as they are spoken.
• Prompt turns the same text into a teleprompter and scrolls it at your pace while you read to camera.
• Dictate reverses the direction: you speak, and your words become the script.

So the text you dictate is the text the voice reads and the text the prompter scrolls. That is the whole idea.

How it is built

It is a static site with no back end. Speech, teleprompting and storage all happen in your browser, which is why it is free, why it has no limits, and why listening and prompting keep working with the network off. The typefaces are self-hosted so that opening a page tells no one anything.

The interface is available in English, Spanish, French, German, Arabic and Chinese, and the tool reads and dictates in any language your device has a voice for.

What it deliberately does not do

It cannot export MP3s. The browser's speech engine plays audio directly and exposes no recordable stream, so there is genuinely no file to hand you. Doing that properly needs a paid cloud service, which would mean accounts and quotas, which is the thing this was built to avoid.

Get in touch

Bug reports, missing languages, or a voice that reads something oddly: support@readaloud.online.