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Comment by mg | Hacker News Reader

Is there a free (ad supported?) online tool without login that reads text that you paste into it?

I often would like to listen to a blog post instead of reading it, but haven't found an easy, quick solution yet.

I tried piping text through OpenAI's tts-1-hd, model and it is the first one I ever found that is human like enough for me to like listening to it. So I could write a tool for my own usecase that pipes the text to tts-1-hd and plays the audio. But maybe there is already something with a public web interface out there?

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Both windows and macos (the operating systems) have this built-in under accessibility. It’s worth a try and I use it sometimes when I want to read something while cooking.

I use ms edge for this exact use case. Works well enough on any platform

Yup, I second this. The only thing I use Edge for.

I did a bit of research and it seems to be, by far, the highest-quality TTS engine that is free and you can do things like pause and continue.

There are other options that have higher-quality voices, but they aren't free.

I use the wavenet extension and use my 1M character free quota from Google cloud

There is on iOS. No ads. "Reader" by Eleven Labs. I haven't used it that much but have listened to some white papers and blogs (some of which were like 45 minutes) and it "just worked". Even let's you click text you want to jump to.

And it's Eleven Labs quality- which unless I've fallen behind the times is the highest quality TTS by a margin.

There's also the built-in "Speak Selection" feature you can enable in the accessibility settings.

Reader is on a pretty good path to a monthly subscription model. Great audio quality, large selection of voices, and support for long-form input text.

firefox does this directly. Reader mode has a headphones symbol to read webpage text.

Good old Microsoft Sam? It'll sound like Stephen Hawking is reading it to you!

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