Chrome extension
ReadLouder puts a reader on every tab. Press Insert, select the text, and it speaks — articles, documentation, and PDFs — lighting up each sentence as it goes.
How it works
The player slides in on top of whatever you're reading. No toolbar hunting — Ctrl+Shift+U works too.
A sentence, a section, or Ctrl+A for the whole page. ReadLouder splits it into sentences so you can skip around.
It reads aloud and highlights the line it's on. Pause, jump back a sentence, or switch voice mid-read.
Voices
Start with the instant option and move up when you want more. Every voice is included in the subscription.
Uses the voices already on your computer. Nothing to download, works with no connection. Good for a quick listen.
Natural-sounding neural voices that run entirely on your machine — your text is never uploaded. Each voice downloads once (~60 MB) the first time you pick it, then it's yours offline.
Microsoft's most natural multilingual voices — Emma, Andrew, Ava — when you add a free Azure key. Best for long-form reading.
PDFs
Open a PDF in ReadLouder's own viewer and it gets a real text layer — so the reader works exactly the way it does on any site: sentence by sentence, with the page scrolling to keep up.
Privacy
The Browser and Piper voices never send your text anywhere — they run on your device. The online voice sends only the sentence being read, and only when you pick it. No account to browse, no reading history, no analytics.
Pricing
7-day free trial · cancel anytime
Payments handled by Polar, our merchant of record. After subscribing you'll get a license key — paste it into the extension menu to unlock. The online Azure voice additionally needs a free Microsoft Azure key (about two minutes to set up); the offline voices need nothing.
Install
Works in Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, and other Chromium browsers. Keep the unzipped folder where it is — Chrome runs the extension from that location. Offline voices download on first use (~60 MB each) and are then kept on your device. A one-click Chrome Web Store install is coming.
Questions
Yes. The Browser and Piper voices need no connection at all. Only the Azure voice does.
It keeps the subscription at $10. Azure's free tier covers roughly 500,000 characters a month — a lot of reading — at no cost to you.
Chrome and other Chromium browsers: Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera. Not Firefox or Safari.
Open the customer portal from the extension's menu, or the link in your receipt. Cancel anytime — access runs to the end of the paid period.
Yes — seven days free. You're only charged if you stay past the trial.
No limit on the offline voices. The online voice is bounded only by your Azure free tier.