Adding a voice to your device

The voices Readalix lists under Browser come from your operating system, not from us. They are free, they never count against the daily allowance, and they work with no connection at all. If your language has none yet, adding one takes a few minutes and it is yours for good.

When you need this

Premium voices share a free allowance of 20,000 characters a day. When it runs out, reading carries on with a browser voice from your device, so you keep listening either way. For most languages one is already installed and you never notice the change.

Some languages ship with none. Persian and Macedonian are two of many that a standard Windows install does not speak, and there the fallback has nothing to fall back to: reading waits for tomorrow's allowance. One system voice ends that for good, at no cost, and it is also what lets Readalix read that language with no connection.

Windows

1. Open Settings, then Time & language, then Speech.
2. Under Manage voices, press Add voices.
3. Find your language in the list, tick it and press Add. Windows downloads it in the background.
4. Close Chrome completely and open it again.

If your language is not in that list, add the language itself first: Settings, Time & language, Language & region, Add a language, and keep the Speech option ticked while it installs.

macOS

1. Open System Settings, then Accessibility, then Spoken Content.
2. Open the System Speech Voice menu and choose Manage Voices.
3. Find your language, download the voice you want, then quit Chrome and open it again.

On macOS Monterey and earlier the same settings are under System Preferences, Accessibility, Spoken Content.

ChromeOS

1. Open Settings, then Accessibility, then Text-to-Speech.
2. Open Text-to-Speech voice settings and pick your language to see the voices offered for it.
3. Install the one you want. A Chromebook adds it straight away, with no restart.

Linux

Chrome on Linux speaks through speech-dispatcher, which most desktops do not install by themselves. Installing speech-dispatcher together with a synthesizer such as espeak-ng from your distribution's package manager gives Chrome a voice in a great many languages at once.

Restart Chrome afterwards. If you would rather not touch system packages, the on-device voices Readalix can download itself (Piper, Kokoro and Supertonic) need nothing from the operating system and sound considerably better.

Back in Readalix

1. Open the toolbar and press the voice button.
2. Choose Browser at the top of the list. Your new voice is there.
3. Press it once to hear a sample, and once more to make it the voice for this language.

What you get, and what you give up

A system voice is the right answer to “I want this language to work, always, for nothing”. It is worth knowing what it is not.

• Free, unlimited and offlineIt costs nothing, spends none of the daily allowance, and speaks with no connection. Nothing you read leaves your machine.
• Plainer than the restSystem voices are older technology than the neural voices under Microsoft, Piper, Kokoro, Supertonic, Gemini, OpenAI and ElevenLabs, and most of them do not report where they are in the sentence, so the word highlight is estimated rather than exact. See Voices and languages for the full comparison.