How to listen to any article, free and paid

Ordered by what it costs you, starting at nothing. Most people do not need to buy anything, and the free options are worth trying first even if you end up paying.

By Ryan Ye · I build one of the paid ones, which is why it is last rather than first.

Free, already installed

Microsoft Edge — Read Aloud

Built into the browser. Open an article, press Ctrl+Shift+U (or ⌘+Shift+U on a Mac) and it reads, highlighting as it goes. The voices are better than most people expect. If you are willing to use Edge for reading, this is the best free option there is and it costs nothing to try.

macOS — spoken selection

Select text anywhere and press Option+Esc. Turn it on in System Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content if the shortcut does nothing. Works in every app, not just the browser, which is its real advantage.

Windows — Narrator

Ctrl+Windows+Enter. Built for screen-reader use rather than for listening to articles, so it is more talkative than you want, but it is there.

Chrome — Reading mode

Strips the page down and can read it aloud. Fewer controls than the others, but no install.

Free, one install

Read Aloud

The open-source Chrome extension, free with no account and no limit. Uses the voices already on your computer, and will use much better cloud voices — Google, Amazon, OpenAI — if you have your own API key to give it. Handles PDFs, Google Docs and ebooks too. If your requirement is "free forever, no sign-up", this is the answer.

NaturalReader's free tier

Around twenty minutes a day of the better AI voices, plus documents as well as web pages. A good way to find out whether voice quality changes anything for you.

Paid

Paying buys two things and not much else: better voices, and no daily ceiling. Whether that is worth it comes down to whether a flat voice loses your attention. For some people it makes no difference at all and the free tools are the end of the story.

Speechify is the one to look at if you want the same article on your phone — cross-device sync is what it does best. NaturalReader is strongest on documents. Text2Voice, which I build, reads web pages with eleven readers that have distinct manners rather than one neutral voice, and sells half an hour of listening for $1.99 as a one-off if you would rather not subscribe.

There is a fuller side-by-side comparison here, including which scenarios each one genuinely wins.

Two things worth getting right

Pick something that skips the page furniture. The difference between a tool that reads the article and one that reads the entire page is enormous in practice. Nothing breaks the thread like a voice announcing "Share on Facebook — Related stories — Sign up for our newsletter" in the middle of a paragraph.

Use one that highlights as it reads. Listening with the current sentence marked on screen is noticeably easier than listening alone. It gives your eyes something to do instead of wandering, and makes it easy to rejoin after you have drifted.