HACKER Q&A
📣 eshack94

Are there any free services that convert website text to speech?


Apologies if this has been asked before. If so, please link me to the relevant thread(s).

I'm looking for a free TTS service or website that will accept a website article URL as input, then parse the contents and produce a decent-sounding audio reading of the article's contents. I intend to use this for personal use only to listen to articles/blog posts while doing chores, exercising, or other activities where reading is impractical but listening is feasible.

An open source project that does this would also be acceptable, as long as it can accept a link as input (rather than requiring one to copy-paste the text of each article). Some modern websites (such as WSJ and The Economist) offer this as a built-in feature on many of their articles, and Edge has this as a built-in feature, but it would be great to find a third party website-agnostic and browser-agnostic service capable of doing this for any given link.

I've seen a lot of "freemium" services while doing a few quick online searches, as well as others with a monthly or per-article fee. If no other solutions exist, I might consider paying for one of these, or I may try to develop my own solution.

Thanks in advance for any insights/suggestions!


  👤 cc101 Accepted Answer ✓
Macs will speak any highlighted text. Not copy/past. Just highlight and click Speech on the Edit menu. It's not quite what you asked for, but better than the copy/paste method.

👤 beardyw
You can do it in JavaScript on a web page. I tested by pasting into a text area, but eventually had automation and ran Audacity to record local audio. Even created Audacity labels to allow audio to be split. This was for a one off game I made.

👤 ohiovr
If you develop your own you could look to GTTS on python which for now is a free service that google will allow you to use if you are careful.