Text To Voice is a Firefox add-on that can turn text on a website into sound. It uses the Vozme service that can turn text on websites into computer voice. Usage is relatively simple and it would be great if the developer would improve the functionality of the add-on.
It currently places an icon in the Firefox status bar that, when clicked, sends the selected text to the Vozme service in a new tab that is opened automatically. An audio player on the page will then play the selected text to the user.
The voice quality is good and clearly understandable most of the time as long as the text is written in the English language or one of the other supported languages. The Vozme service supports other languages such as Spanish, Hindi and Italian as well and those seem to be also supported by the add-on.
It would be nice if the developer would find a way to include the Vozme application on the same page so that it is possible to see the text and hear the voice at the same time. It can only be done manually currently by switching back to the last tab as soon as the Vozme page has loaded in Firefox.
Text To Voice is available from the Mozilla website. It is compatible with all Firefox releases up to Firefox 3.7.
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I keep Netscape 9.0.0.6 installed so I can run some of the older Firefox Addons. My favorite is this…
http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/addons/3552/speak_it-0.2.0.2-fx-windows.xpi
It will read selected text or the entire page. It reads the news to me while I’m busy answering questions in online forums.
When reading text watch out for page dividers made like this “============” it will read you everyone of those and drive you crazy.