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User guide

Getting started

Five minutes from an empty toolbar to a page reading itself out loud. Nothing to sign up for, and no settings to fill in first.

On this page

Install it

  1. Open the Readalix listing in the Chrome Web Store.
  2. Press Add to Chrome, then Add extension in the confirmation box.
  3. That is the whole install. There is no account, no sign-in and no onboarding tour.
The Readalix listing in the Chrome Web Store, with the blue Add to Chrome button beside the extension name.
The Chrome Web Store listing. Add to Chrome is the only button you need.

Pin it

Chrome hides new extensions behind the puzzle-piece icon. Readalix is worth one click rather than two, so pin it:

  1. Click the puzzle piece at the right of the address bar.
  2. Find Readalix in the list and click the pin beside it.
  3. Its icon now sits in the toolbar, and clicking it opens the reading toolbar.
Chrome's Extensions menu open from the puzzle-piece icon, with an arrow pointing at the pin beside the Readalix entry.
Pinning puts the icon in the toolbar for good.

Your first read

  1. Open any article.
  2. Select a paragraph with the mouse.
  3. Click the Readalix icon, then press the big play button on the left of the toolbar.

A voice starts reading. The sentence being read takes a soft tint, and inside it the word being spoken lights up, so your eye always knows where the voice is.

An article read aloud in Chrome: the sentence being read is tinted and the spoken word is highlighted inside it.
A read in progress on an ordinary page.

You do not have to select anything. Press play with nothing selected and Readalix looks for the article on the page, skipping menus, sidebars and footers, and reads that instead. Reading any page covers the rest of the ways in.

The toolbar, button by button

Clicking the icon opens one row of round buttons. From the left:

  • Play, pause, resumeThe big one. It reads, freezes on the exact word when you pause, and picks that same word up again when you resume.
  • Pick an elementArms a pointer: hover a part of the page, click it, and the read starts there.
  • LanguageWhich language the text is in. The corner badge shows the code, and the tooltip spells the language out.
  • VoiceEvery voice available for that language, grouped by where it comes from. Its badge is tinted by source, so a glance tells you whether you are on a browser voice or a neural one.
  • Reading speedFrom a slow crawl up to 3x, changeable while it is speaking.
  • Save as audio or videoTurns what play would read into a file. See Saving audio and video.
  • SettingsThe gear at the end. It opens the full settings view in place.

That row is yours to arrange. Every button except play and the gear can be hidden, and all of them can be dragged into another order, in Settings, Toolbar.

The Readalix toolbar: one row of round icon buttons, labelled play or pause or resume, pick an element, Language, Voice, Reading speed, Save as audio or video, and Settings.
The whole interface is this one row, plus what opens from it.

What it costs

The voices already installed in your browser are free, with no limit and no counter. Every other voice (Microsoft, Piper, Kokoro, Gemini, OpenAI) shares a free allowance of 20,000 characters a day, which is roughly 22 minutes of speech. When that runs out reading does not stop: it carries on in a browser voice from the next sentence, and the allowance is back the next day.

Removing the daily limit costs $5 a year, or $15 once. The Premium section of the settings holds both, and a small meter there shows how much of today's allowance is left.