Text to Speech on a Chromebook: Select-to-Speak vs Extensions

How do you turn on text-to-speech on a Chromebook?

Chromebooks come with a free, built-in reader called Select-to-Speak that works on almost anything on screen. If you want more voices or one-click reading inside Chrome tabs specifically, a text to speech chromebook extension like Read Aloud — see more in our text-to-speech hub — adds that on top.

1. Click the clock in the bottom-right corner, then click the gear icon to open Settings.
2. Go to Accessibility in the left sidebar.
3. Open Text-to-Speech, then turn on Select-to-speak.
4. Hold the launcher (Everything) button, or press Search, and click or drag across any text on screen to hear it read aloud.

How does ChromeOS's Select-to-Speak actually work?

Once you turn it on in Settings > Accessibility > Text-to-Speech, Select-to-Speak adds a small icon to your shelf and lets you highlight any text on screen to hear it read back.

Click and drag across a paragraph, or click a single word, and ChromeOS reads it using the system's built-in voice. Because it works at the operating system level rather than inside Chrome, Select-to-Speak can read text in Android apps and PDF documents opened in the Files app, not just web pages.

• Works across ChromeOS apps and PDFs, not just Chrome tabs.
• Free and pre-installed — no extension needed for the basic feature.
• Fewer voice options than most dedicated text to speech chromebook extension tools, since it uses the system voice rather than cloud voices.
• No shortcuts for adjustable playback speed the way some extensions offer.

How do you set up the Read Aloud extension on a Chromebook?

Install it from the Chrome Web Store like any other extension, then click its icon on any page to hear that page's text read aloud.

Read Aloud reads the current web-page article with one click, using text-to-speech in more than 40 languages. It works on news sites, blogs, and course materials, and can also read PDFs, Google Docs, Google Play Books, and Amazon Kindle content, plus EPUB files with the help of the separate EPUBReader extension.

1. Navigate to the page you want read aloud.
2. Click the Read Aloud icon in your toolbar (or use the shortcut Alt+P).
3. To read only part of a page, select the text first, then click the icon or right-click and choose Read Aloud from the context menu.
4. Use Alt+O to pause, and Alt+Comma and Alt+Period to adjust playback.

How do you change the voice, speed, or pitch of a text-to-speech extension?

In Read Aloud, that's the Options page reached from the gear icon on its popup. In the Text to Speech (TTS) extension, it's a settings page reached from the extension's own toolbar button.

Read Aloud offers native browser voices for free and gives you the option to use cloud voices from providers like Google Wavenet, Amazon Polly, IBM Watson, Microsoft Azure, and OpenAI — some of those cloud voices may need an in-app purchase or your own API key.

The Text to Speech (TTS) extension takes a different approach: click its toolbar button for a standalone interface where you can type text and choose between two TTS engines, or select text on a webpage to see a small speaker icon appear, which reads that selection using your browser's Web Speech API. Its Kokoro AI engine works only in the standalone interface, but once loaded it can run fully offline and even save the result as a .wav file.

Should you use Select-to-Speak or a text to speech chromebook extension?

Use Select-to-Speak for anything outside a browser tab, and an extension for reading full web articles with more voice choices.

How do you get speech-to-text (voice typing) on a Chromebook?

ChromeOS has a separate built-in Dictation feature for turning your voice into typed text, found in Settings > Accessibility > Keyboard and text input > Dictation.

Turn it on, then click into any text field and select the dictation microphone icon (or use your keyboard's dedicated dictation key, if it has one) to start typing with your voice. This is a different feature from Select-to-Speak — one reads text out loud, the other turns speech into text.

If you want dictation inside specific web apps rather than system-wide, extensions like Voice In, Speechnotes, DictationDaddy, or Speech to Text AI focus specifically on typing by voice into fields like Gmail, Google Docs, or chat tools, sometimes with better accuracy tuning for a particular site than the system dictation offers.

Does text-to-speech work with PDFs, Google Docs, or Kindle books on a Chromebook?

Yes, both routes cover this, but in different ways. Select-to-Speak reads any PDF opened in the Files app or a PDF viewer, since it works at the system level.

Read Aloud reads PDFs, Google Docs, Google Play Books, and Amazon Kindle content when they're open in a Chrome tab, and can read EPUB files once you also install the separate EPUBReader extension alongside it.

• Files app PDFs: use Select-to-Speak (system-level, no extension needed).
• Browser-tab PDFs, Docs, Kindle, and Play Books: either Select-to-Speak or Read Aloud will work.
• EPUB files: Read Aloud plus the EPUBReader extension.

Why won't a text-to-speech extension read the whole page, or stop working?

It's usually a permissions issue, a paused state, or a site that blocks the extension's script from running.

• Check the extension has site access allowed for the page you're on — see our permissions guide for what these access levels actually mean.
• Make sure playback is fully stopped, not just paused, before trying to open the Options page — several TTS extensions hide their settings while a track is playing.
• Refresh the tab after installing an extension for the first time; content scripts sometimes need a fresh page load to attach.
• If a cloud voice stops responding, check your connection — cloud-based voices need internet access, while offline engines like Kokoro AI can keep working without one once loaded.
• Select text paragraph by paragraph, rather than a whole page, to avoid most in-page highlighting bugs.

Which text-to-speech and speech-to-text extensions are worth installing on a Chromebook?

Start with a dedicated reader for the actual text-to-speech job, then add a dictation extension separately if you also need speech-to-text.

If you're setting up a Chromebook for a classroom or shared account, see how to add extensions on a Chromebook and our wider list of best Chromebook extensions for more picks. For anyone comparing writing tools rather than reading tools, Grammarly on a Chromebook covers a related but different use case.