Speak It was a very popular Firefox add-on. It is listed to be compatible with Firefox 2 only at the official Mozilla homepage but a user changed the compatibility of the add-on and made it compatible with Firefox 3 as well.

It utilizes text to speech capabilities of the operating system to provide the means to read out text aloud to the user. It integrates itself nicely in the right-click context menu and can be used to read out all of the text on a website or only the selected text.

It comes with some options to configure the add-on. It is possible to change the read rate and volume. There is also the possibility to change the text to speech engine if more than one engine is installed on the computer system.

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Most options are available after registering to the service which is rather hassle free. Once you’ve done that you can access the main page where you can make a decision about the type of text to speech service that you want to use. Several general options are available that customize the output further.

It is possible to select one speaker out of 15 available ones. Male and female speakers are available as well as speakers with accents (US, UK and Indian) and Spanish and French speakers. The reading speed can be changed as well, you can slow it down by a maximum of 25% and speed it up by up to 70%.

My test recordings took less than a minute to generate but it surely depends on the size of the text. Once the recording is done it is accessible online in an embedded media player but it can also be downloaded as an mp3 file or embedded on another website. A Podcast column is available as well which was not clickable at the time of this writing. Recordings can be deleted as well.

The option to convert websites to speech is nice but you should avoid websites with lots of menus and stuff. I did a test with an article at Ghacks and everything was processed. The menu was included as well as the footer. If the website has a print option use that because this normally comes without menu and other stuff. If there is nothing like that you might want to consider copying and pasting the text instead.

The speech itself is well done. You still notice that the speaker is a computer and not a real human, especially between words. The words itself are pronounced very nicely as far as I can tell.

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