Read Aloud

Reading your work aloud is one of the oldest editing tricks: your ear catches a clumsy sentence, a repeated word, or a missing one that your eye glides over. Spleen can do the reading for you, and marks each word as it speaks it, so you see and hear the same word at once.

Start reading

With a document open, select Read aloud in the bar at the top of the page, the button with sound lines. On a phone, it is in the ⋮ menu at the top right.

• If you have selected text, Spleen reads just that.
• Otherwise it starts at the beginning of the paragraph your cursor is in, and reads on to the end of the document.

While Spleen reads

A small bar appears at the foot of the screen with Pause, the speed, and Stop. Choose 0.8× to slow down, or 1.25× to go faster.

• Click anywhere in the text to carry on reading from there.
• Start typing to stop, since the text being read has changed.
• Press Escape, select Stop, or select Read aloud again to stop.

When you stop, your cursor waits at the word you last heard, so a mistake you just caught is right there to fix.

If the radio is playing, it pauses while Spleen reads and starts again when the reading ends. Turn the radio on during a reading and the reading pauses instead; select Resume to go on, and the radio goes quiet again.

Voices and privacy

Spleen reads with the voices your device already has, and only voices that speak on the device itself. Some browsers also offer online voices, which send text away to be spoken; Spleen never uses those, so your writing does not leave your device.

By default, Spleen picks a voice in the language it is set to. To choose another, for instance a Dutch voice for a Dutch manuscript, open Preferences → Readability → Read aloud voice.

How a voice sounds depends on your device. Macs, iPhones, iPads, Windows, and Android phones come with natural voices. On Linux, a voice is only there if a speech service is installed, and it tends to sound mechanical. When a device has no voice of its own, the Read aloud button does not appear.

If you don't see Read aloud

Read aloud needs a speech engine on your device. Macs, iPhones, iPads, Windows, and Android phones have one built in. If the button is missing there, check that a voice is installed under your system's speech or accessibility settings.

On Linux, install one first. On Arch Linux, for example:

sudo pacman -S speech-dispatcher espeak-ng

Other distributions have packages with the same names. Then:

• Firefox finds the speech engine after a full restart.
• Chrome, Chromium, and Brave also need to be started with --enable-speech-dispatcher. Add that line to your browser's flags file, such as ~/.config/chromium-flags.conf, or the one your browser's launcher reads, and restart the browser completely.

On a phone

On a phone, reading stops when the screen locks or you switch to another app. Some Android phones do not report which word they are on; Spleen then marks the sentence being read instead.