Leia: Read Aloud by rclb.dev

Leia reads webpages aloud while a highlight follows the words being spoken, right on the page. Start listening, click any sentence to jump there, close the tab, and come back later to the same spot.

HOW IT WORKS

• Press Alt+Shift+L or the toolbar button to start reading.
• Leia finds the article on the page and reads it, or reads just your selection.
• A highlight moves through the text in step with the audio. Where the voice engine provides word timings the highlight moves word by word, otherwise it moves sentence by sentence. Each engine states what it supports before you pick it.
• Click any sentence to jump the audio there.
• Leia remembers your reading position per page, so you can resume where you stopped.

YOUR VOICE, YOUR CHOICE

Four kinds of voice engines sit behind one picker, with their capabilities disclosed up front:

• Browser voices (Web Speech). Built in, no account, works offline. This is the default.
• Built-in on-device voice (kitten). A small speech model that downloads once to your machine, then runs fully offline.
• Local model servers. Point Leia at a local TTS server such as Kokoro-FastAPI or a Piper profile, and everything stays on your machine.
• Provider voices. Add your own API key for ElevenLabs, Azure Speech, OpenAI, Mistral, xAI, Gemini, MiniMax, Qwen, Fish Audio, and more. Page text is sent to that provider to be spoken.

PRIVACY

Leia has no servers and collects no data. Your settings and keys stay in your browser's local storage. The default engine sends nothing anywhere. If you add a provider key, page text goes to that provider only, and each engine discloses when it works this way.

MADE FOR FOLLOW-ALONG READING

• Contrast-adaptive highlight themes stay legible on any page. When no color variant contrasts enough, the highlight falls back to an outline.
• Multi-language reading, including CJK text.
• Built for readers with dyslexia, low vision, or reading fatigue, and for anyone who would rather listen than scroll.

Leia is free and open source under the MPL-2.0 license. It needs Chrome 109 or later, or Firefox 140 or later.