ReadFollow: Text to Speech with Word Highlights by Dor Zairi

ReadFollow reads text aloud and highlights each word on the page as it is spoken, so you can follow along with your eyes.

Watch the 21-second demo on YouTube

How to use it

• Select text on any page and press Alt+O, or right-click it and choose "Read aloud selected text".
• The sentence being read turns blue and the current word is marked in amber and underlined.
• A small bar gives you previous and next sentence, pause, speed and stop. Drag it anywhere; it remembers the spot on each site, and you can hide it on a site from its menu.
• Click any word in the selection to jump there.
• With nothing selected, the toolbar button reads the whole page and shows the text in the popup as it goes.

PDFs too. PDFs open in a built-in PDF.js viewer with the same highlighting, so no PDF is uploaded anywhere.

Voices

• The voices on your computer, which highlight word by word.
• Piper voices: natural voices you download once that then run on your device, offline.
• Google Translate voices for many languages.
• Your own OpenAI, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Polly or IBM Watson account, if you have one.

For voices that don't report word positions, ReadFollow works out the word from the length of each piece of audio, so the highlight keeps time with the voice.

Made to be read

Highlight colors to choose from, including an underline-only style, light and dark themes, full keyboard use, and an interface in 27 languages, including Arabic and Hebrew right to left.

Your text

With the voices on your computer and Piper voices, text never leaves your device. Online voices receive only the text you ask them to read, and Settings shows which service gets it for the voice you picked. ReadFollow has no account, no analytics and no ads, and the developer receives nothing. Privacy policy

Open source

ReadFollow is built on Read Aloud by Hai Phan and is MIT licensed. Source, credits and issues: github.com/MashdorDev/readfollow. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Read Aloud or its author.