I’ve seen mentions of the “read aloud” feature, but I do not see anyplace in the reader to have it read an article that I have uploaded. How can I create audio or have an article “read” to listen and read at the same time?
(Not to make comparisons, but one of the best LingQ features these days is that it can generate very good audio of an uploaded text and you can then use keyboard shortcuts to “read” sentence by sentence or read the entire article and it highlights lines as it reads.)
Read about it here: Introducing Read-Aloud - Readlang Blog
The button (if available) is here at the bottom of the page:
Note that the availability of this feature is dependent on your browser and device. So if you don’t see this button it’s likely because your browser does not have voices available for the language of the text you have uploaded. The browser with the best selection of voices seems to be Microsoft Edge (on all platforms except for iOS).
Hmm. That’s strange because I do not see that button, but it will pronounce words that I mark for learning. So I’m not sure what the difference is. And other tools like LR that also use the browser’s built in language processing work. Are there any plans to make this more available?
On flashcards have you considered an option to have the entire sentence read and not just the word to reinforce the word in the context of the sentence?
Also is there a reason that every time I activate the readlang extension on a website I also have to click to enable text to speech?
Sorry for all the questions–I’m trying to get up to speed on Readlang. I’ve used LingQ extensively because I thought Readlang was abandoned and only recently realized the project was active again.
If you don’t see it your browser probably doesn’t have voice support for that language. Have you tried MS Edge? It has the best voice support in my experience (although not on iOS).
If you want you can also upload mp3 audio files via the Upload Page.
I’m on Mac. I typically use Brave, and I also tried Edge. And the result was exactly the same in my target language (Hebrew). And the voices are the same. If I manually tell Edge to read a page aloud, I can select one of the Azure enhanced voices. But when going back to Readlang it uses the default voice and not the enhanced Azure one on Edge–the same voice that it uses on Brave and Firefox. And, regardless of the browser I never get any option to read the text aloud within Readlang.
I’m not sure exactly where the voice the browser uses is coming from, because it’s not the enhanced voice I have enabled in Mac settings. But it’s a voice that’s common in other apps that use text to speech.
I’m just curious–are there any plans to increase the capabilities of text to speech? I’m am not trying to compare, but this is an area LingQ does really well. There is an option to pay for enhanced voices and I believe it uses Eleven Lab’s voices. Regardless, they are very, very good. And the ability to play a sentence can be really helpful. And on texts you have the option to “generate audio” which produces really good audio from text.
No criticism here, but TTS technology can be really helpful so I’m curious if there any plans to improve this.
In the meantime, I am uploading mp3s where possible.
I have a similar confusion, that even with languages that support Read Aloud, the TTS voice isn’t the same as the TTS that plays when you click a single word. I don’t know where these are coming from (as a PC Chrome user).
I mainly tried to look into this due to the Vietnamese TTS (the individual word TTS; there is no Vietnamese Read Aloud on my PC [except in Edge]). This reads Vietnamese in a southern accent, which isn’t what I’ve learned… I believe I had the same issue on LingQ. I tried installing Windows’ Vietnamese “voice package” but I didn’t see where this might open up any options.
On my ChromeBook, Vietnamese as well as Hebrew have Read Aloud, and it works nicely, with a choice of voices on the Aa tab. But the individual word TTS for Vietnamese, even on ChromeBook I can’t figure out what to do to fix it.
