Reviews for Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader
Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader by LSD Software
1,056 reviews
- Rated 4 out of 5by hunsai, 8 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Michael J, 8 months ago
- Rated 2 out of 5by max.tela, 8 months agoIt is a cool idea and helps a lot with my dyslexia. But it works properly less than half of the time.
1. Detecting the text correctly, especially on websites where text is separated by other content or when there are multiple columns.
2. Often the reading out does not stop when click pause or stop, I have to close all Firefox windows to make the reading out stop. - Rated 5 out of 5by Federico Calzoni, 8 months agoPiper's voices are really good. I really appreciate the automatic language selection.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 13284157, 8 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by LuisFer, 8 months ago
- Rated 2 out of 5by Firefox user 15621291, 8 months agoThe voice is good, but the controls don't do jack. The pause button does absolutely nothing ever, and the second time I tried the add on the highlighted text didn't match what was being read (no idea where in the document it was reading from) and this time I had to close the browser entirely to make it stop reading.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Paul Newsom, 8 months ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by Tom, 8 months agoSolid add-on, but the fact that you need to have an entire tab open in order to use the new piper.ttstool voices makes the add-on much less convenient
- Rated 4 out of 5by CrubNine, 9 months ago1.68 update is leaving a residue static sound whenever there is text loaded in the extension. This is distracting and making the pause feature unusable for me.
Edit: I tried out older versions and retried the new one and the problem went away. No idea what was causing it. I encountered another bug however with the new "Piper" feature, the extension was not able to load the manager page where you install the voices. It worked on Brave though (I use LibreWolf)
Edit2: Static sound problem came back. I decided to revert back and stay in version 1.66 No longer experience the issue on that version. - Rated 5 out of 5by stelgado, 9 months agoAdding the piper voices is a game changer!! Thank you Dev.
Initially, I was pretty unhappy with the robotic voices and decided to read the reviews and found the same complaints. Then I saw that there was an update a week ago and, lo and behold, you can now add custom voices from piper that sound so much more human. It's a night and day difference. Makes this so much more worth it now. Even though it's still in the experimental phase, it works just fine for me.
I urge everyone to try it out in settings. - Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 18349635, 9 months ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 18355450, 9 months agoThe default voice is unintelligible and the other voices are not much better. This is a joke of an app.
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 18301993, 9 months ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 18345139, 9 months ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by Mike Evans, 9 months ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 18316759, 9 months ago
- Rated 4 out of 5by Firefox user 18331836, 9 months agoUsed this for like years to make my novels audiobooks and the desktop browser version of it works pretty well. IMO, the only good TTS voice is the microsoft zira one lol. Works very well for what it is, but the in-built firefox reader also has a TTS function, which is essentially the same thing. I don't discourage people from using this extension though, since it comes in handy when you just need one specific section TTS'd and it's quicker to activate than the in-built one.
An issue I found only on the desktop browser is that the highlighted text would jump ahead of the actual text the extension is reading and it would continue reading the text even if you press 'stop' (only in the case of the jumping highlighted text). Found that if this happens, press 'test' in the settings and the 'stop' after and it'll stop. Kind of annoying though since it happens every so often.
On the other hand, the mobile version of the extension is kinda meh. The issue I mentioned before doesn't seem to exist on mobile but a different one cropped up. On certain sites, or pages within the sites, the TTS randomly decides to change their voice to another. Again, only microsoft zira is listenable so it forces me to just stop the TTS and read manually.
Also, the 'sign in to use premium voices' have never acutally worked for me on mobile. Every time I click 'sign in', nothing appears T_T, lowkey frustrating. And apart from the offline voices, all of the voices don't work when I'm running on data. They do work when I'm using someone elses hotspot tho :(. Frustrating since I usually want to use mobile TTS when I'm out and about. - Rated 4 out of 5by Saydine, 9 months ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 18285094, 10 months agoIn Dutch it just uses the Microsoft TTS-voice (Frank), which is already build in in Firefox itself, rendering this extension completely useless. The UI adds nothing special, you can't even choose where you want it to start reading.
- Rated 5 out of 5by floating-table, 10 months agoRecently, the extension has been acting up on Firefox, constantly throwing the `NS_ERROR_DOM_MEDIA_METADATA_ERR` error. There's nothing wrong with the base64 audio being received, I verified that. Somehow it's triggering an old bug in Firefox I think, mentioned in this StackOverflow post: httpsstackoverflowcom/questions/44200990/html5-audio-player-in-firefox-is-not-working
EDIT: I found the issue. It was me. I diff'd my prefsjs file with a default one. Found out a sus config I don't remember changing. media.ffvpx.enabled was set to false. Setting it to true again fixed it. I am not sure why, maybe the decoding logic lives there..? - Rated 5 out of 5by Yuri M., 10 months ago