Listen

Using Listen

1. Open the article and click the PrintFriendly button in your browser. PrintFriendly View opens over the page.
2. Click Listen in the toolbar. A player appears at the bottom of the window and starts reading from the top, and the page scrolls to keep the current sentence in view.
3. Use the player. Play and Pause control the voice, Previous sentence and Next sentence skip one sentence at a time, and dragging the progress bar jumps to any point. The speed menu runs from 0.7x to 2x.
4. To start somewhere else, click a paragraph in the article. Listen begins at the top of it.
5. Click Stop listening (the X) to close the player. Closing PrintFriendly View stops the voice too.

If you stop partway through and open the same article again later, Listen carries on from the sentence where you stopped. It remembers this for your last article only.

What It Reads

The title and the article, as PrintFriendly View shows them. Delete a part of the page before you first press Listen and it won't be read. Along the way, Listen:

• skips code blocks,
• leaves out citation marks such as [1], and
• says how many rows a table has instead of reading every cell.

Voices

Your browser does the speaking, so the voices you hear depend on it:

• Edge includes Microsoft's natural-sounding online voices.
• Chrome includes Google's online voices.
• Safari and Firefox use the voices installed on your computer, phone or tablet.

Online voices need an internet connection. Voices are named by language and accent, such as English (United Kingdom). Listen picks a voice for the article's language and remembers your speed, and your choice of voice for each language. Voices in other languages are under Other languages at the top of the voice menu.

Where It Works

Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari, including Safari on iPhone and iPad. It costs nothing and needs no extra permissions. On a phone, the progress bar gets a row of its own.