When to use it
Text to Speech reads text aloud in a natural voice. Use it to listen to an article while you cook or commute, proofread your own writing by ear, practise pronunciation in another language, help a child or a struggling reader follow along, rest your eyes, or check how a speech or script sounds before recording it.
How to read text aloud
- Type or paste into Text to read aloud.
- Choose a Voice. The list shows the voices available on your device.
- Adjust Speed, Pitch and Volume.
- Press Read aloud. Use Pause to pause and continue, and Stop to end.
Voices come from your device, so the list differs between phones and computers.
A worked example
You’ve written a two-minute wedding toast and want to hear how it flows. Paste it in, choose a voice in your language, and set Speed to 0.9× so it’s close to a relaxed speaking pace. Listening, you notice one sentence is a mouthful and a joke lands too quickly. You shorten the sentence, add a pause before the punchline, and listen again.
Tips for natural results
- Use punctuation: commas and full stops create natural pauses.
- Write numbers and abbreviations the way they’re spoken when they matter, such as “twenty twenty-six” instead of “2026”, or “for example” instead of “e.g.”.
- Slow down to 0.8 to 0.9× for learning languages or proofreading.
- Try several voices; quality varies a lot between them.
- Long texts: break very long documents into sections for easier listening.
Proofreading by ear
Hearing your writing read back catches mistakes your eyes skip over: missing words, repeated words, clumsy sentences and wrong homophones such as “their” and “there”. It’s one of the most effective quick checks for emails, essays and reports.
Good everyday uses
- Long emails and articles you’d rather listen to.
- Recipes read step by step while your hands are busy.
- Study notes for revision on the go.
Common mistakes
- Choosing a voice for the wrong language, which mispronounces everything.
- Expecting a downloadable audio file.
- Pasting text with lots of symbols or URLs, which voices read awkwardly.
Private by design
toolwise doesn’t upload your text; speech is produced by your browser and device.
Related tools
Turn speech into text with Speech to Text, check how easy your text is to read with the Readability Checker, or practise spelling with Spelling Practice.