Text To Voice Add-On For Firefox

Text To Voice is a Firefox add-on that can turn text on any website into sound. It uses the Vozme service that can turn text on websites into computer voice.

Usage is relatively simple and once you have used the extension for a while, you will likely come to the conclusion that the developer should improve the functionality of the add-on to make it more useful.

It currently places an icon in the Firefox status bar that, when clicked on, sends the selected text to the Vozme service in a new tab that is opened automatically. An audio player on the page plays the selected text to you then.

The voice quality is good and clearly understandable most of the time as long as the text is available in English or one of the other supported languages. According to the developer, all languages but English have a slightly robotic tone to them.

Text To Voice Add-On For Firefox

The Vozme service supports other languages such as Spanish, Hindi and Italian as well, and those appear 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 read the text and listen to the audio 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 recent Firefox releases.

Update: The extension has been modified by its author in recent time. It works now by selecting text on a website and clicking the extension button afterwards. Note that it is not displayed by default anymore and that you need to use the browser's customize option to drag it to one of the toolbars.

A small popup is displayed afterwards with a download mp3 link. A click on it downloads the mp3 file and plays it afterwards in the same popup window.

The quality is not really that good anymore. You can change the voice gender and switch from the default language English to another support language in the add-on's options.

Update 2: The author created a new add-on for Firefox called Speechify. It improves Text to Voice in several ways, and while you may still use the former, you may want to give the new one a try as well to see which performs better for your.

Speechify works by selecting text you want read aloud, and clicking on a play button to start voice playback.

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