Reviews for Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader
Read Aloud: A Text to Speech Voice Reader by LSD Software
Review by SomeAB
Rated 4 out of 5
by SomeAB, a year agoTL:DR - I personally find MS Zira voice with 75% speed, 100% pitch, to be good enough for most scenarios. Default settings sound horrible, but can be tweaked, that is what I mean.
Okay overall with all things considered, this is currently among the most easy to use TTS (Text to Speech) addons
Pros:
- Easy to use, works fine with a google translated page, easily identifies what you want to read
- You can use Google Wavenet, Amazon Polly & IBM Watson voices with it, if you have API access (all 3 of them have a free tier)
- Has a dark background pop-up that shows the text in a simple readable format alongside speech
Cons:
- Biggest con is that it doesn't use the new Microsoft voices that come with Windows Narrator. It only uses the old Zira, Adam, voices which are of lower quality.
- No way to add a custom Offline voice model. The option of 'Custom Voice is for the online APIs'
- I heard somewhere, that even in offline mode, it does uses some google apis, but haven't checked myself. Given it is recommended by Mozilla officially, I guess its alright for non-security scenarios.
Okay overall with all things considered, this is currently among the most easy to use TTS (Text to Speech) addons
Pros:
- Easy to use, works fine with a google translated page, easily identifies what you want to read
- You can use Google Wavenet, Amazon Polly & IBM Watson voices with it, if you have API access (all 3 of them have a free tier)
- Has a dark background pop-up that shows the text in a simple readable format alongside speech
Cons:
- Biggest con is that it doesn't use the new Microsoft voices that come with Windows Narrator. It only uses the old Zira, Adam, voices which are of lower quality.
- No way to add a custom Offline voice model. The option of 'Custom Voice is for the online APIs'
- I heard somewhere, that even in offline mode, it does uses some google apis, but haven't checked myself. Given it is recommended by Mozilla officially, I guess its alright for non-security scenarios.
1,066 reviews
- Rated 5 out of 5by Fabs, 14 hours agoI'm quite baffled by all the bad reviews; the default voice is indeed uncomprehensible, but changing it to one of the (many!) Piper voices actually gives you an output that's easy to listen to and quite enjoyable. English voices' output is, in my opinion, almost on par to Edge's TTS.
While I can't speak for all the other languages, I can say that at the moment the Italian Piper models are a bit lacking compared to the English ones, but they're still comprehensible. - Rated 5 out of 5by P R Merrill, 6 days agoMy eyesight is failing *AMD) and this extension has saved my life. It's only fault is it won't read text that isn't really text but a picture of text. quite a few folks use that method on wed sites and ads. I will just skip those. Thanks for being there for us.
- Rated 3 out of 5by Martina, 10 days agoUsed to work great, I do not mind robotic voices as long as my eyes get a rest. But last few days it is barely usable, it is not reading paragraph I click on, but it reads everything from the start, or does reads whole paragraphs on every section I click. It used to skip immediately where I wanted. It does not stop when I click stop, nor pause. It highlights different sections than it reads. Removing and adding the add on again did not hep. On average, I rate 3 stars due to previous good experience, but it is no longer usable for me.
- Rated 4 out of 5by Nahuel, 10 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Tyler, 11 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Peter, 11 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Kambiz, 15 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by DiegoC, 16 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by anthony.fordjr, 19 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by MozBruttoDev, 20 days ago
- Rated 3 out of 5by k0ns0l, 22 days agoIt appears I can no longer install a custom voice :/
Activity log is showing "TypeError: Error in input stream" even after a 100% install status. - Rated 1 out of 5by Firefox user 18740215, 24 days ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 18739799, 24 days ago
Developer response
posted 25 days agoPlease right click the Read Aloud icon and choose Options, then you can choose from a variety of voices, including the new Piper voices powered by machine learning.- Rated 5 out of 5by Dedy Hidayat, 25 days ago
- Rated 1 out of 5by techguru12, a month agoJust robotic terrible voice which is there whatever I choose, reinstalling ... nothing works!! awfull
- Rated 1 out of 5by Hashimx10, a month agoeven talkit from windows 98 is still much better than this one.
- Rated 3 out of 5by MC, a month ago
- Rated 5 out of 5by Firefox user 18462716, a month ago