Text-to-Speech
Convert text to audio.
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How text becomes speech in a browser
Speech synthesis converts written text into audio. Older systems concatenated recorded fragments; modern ones use neural models that generate a waveform directly, which is why synthetic voices have improved so sharply in the last few years. Either way the engine must first work out how to pronounce what it reads — expanding numbers and abbreviations, guessing at unfamiliar names, and choosing intonation from punctuation.
Browsers expose this through the Web Speech API, which hands your text to the speech engine already installed on your operating system. That is why the available voices differ between Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS, and why the same page sounds different on your laptop and your phone. It also means the synthesis runs on your device, using voices you already have, with no cloud service in the loop.
Why we built this tool
People use text to speech to proofread by ear, which catches clumsy sentences that reading silently misses; to work through long documents while doing something else; and as an accessibility aid for dyslexia or low vision.
Cloud text-to-speech services transmit whatever you want read aloud to their servers — which, for a draft contract or a private letter, is a meaningful disclosure. Because we use the browser's built-in synthesis, your text is handed to your own operating system's voice engine and never to us. There is no upload, no account, and no length limit imposed by an API quota. It is a good example of the browser already having a capability that most websites needlessly outsource.
Tips and common mistakes
- Available voices come from your operating system, so they differ between devices.
- Proofreading by ear catches clumsy sentences that silent reading skims past.
- Punctuation drives intonation — add commas where you want the voice to pause.
- Unusual names and technical terms are frequently mispronounced; spell them phonetically to test.
Open Text-to-Speech with a link
Text-to-Speech can be handed its input by the link that opens it, so the page arrives with the work already done. This is meant for assistants and scripts: if a chatbot, an editor extension, or a command-line agent already holds your content, it can build a link instead of asking you to copy and paste into a box.
The payload rides in the fragment — the part of a URL after the #. Browsers never send the fragment to a server, so anything handed over this way stays on your device exactly as a dropped file would. A link that uses the query string instead is rewritten into the fragment by the page before any analytics or ad script can read the address.
Prefix any field with gz — #gztext= — to pass it as gzip-compressed base64url, which fits roughly five to ten times more into the same link. Links stay reliable up to about 8,000 characters; past that, chat apps and address bars start truncating them, and the page says so rather than loading half a document.
One exception to the privacy rule: ?url= tells the page to download the input from an address. That request goes from your browser straight to that server — not through ours — but it does leave your device, and it only works if the server allows cross-origin requests.
#text=— the text to work on
Example: https://mygadgets.ink/tools/text-to-speech/#text=...
Quick start: using Text-to-Speech
- Paste the text you want read aloud.
- Choose a voice from those your device provides.
- Adjust the speaking rate and pitch to something comfortable.
- Start playback and follow along with the written text.
- Pause and edit any sentence that sounds wrong when spoken.
For the reverse, Speech to Text dictates into writing, and Extract Text from PDF gets text out of documents to read.