Reading mode in Chrome will read the article soon
New text-to-speech features will be coming soon in chrome.
Google Chrome is coming with new experimental features called flags. One of those features is Reading Mode available in the Chrome browser. This will give you a clean and organized reading experience whenever you read an article. And now it looks like Google will soon be able to use this handy Chrome feature to “listen” to articles instead of reading them. Let’s see the details below.
You will be able to hear articles and text on websites.
Google is working on a useful reading mode text-to-speech feature for Chrome on desktop. This feature allows you to have Google read your articles aloud. As spotted by browser expert Leopeva64, Google is testing this new reading mode feature in Chrome Canary builds, but no word yet on when it will make it into stable builds.
Read Aloud converts the selected article into an audio book for you to listen to. The play icon is at the top center of the Reading Mode toolbar, and the rest of the functions, such as text formatting and editing, are contained in submenus accessed from the gear icon.
Source
Leopeva64 shared a working snippet of this feature, but as far as we can see it’s still “work in progress”. First, there’s very little you can do after clicking the little play button. The Chrome browser will begin reading the selected article in a very generic robotic voice. Narration can be interrupted at any time. However, if you want your browser to be able to comment on specific sections of selected articles, that’s still not possible.
Chrome for desktop will also have the option to “read aloud” articles, the initial implementation of this feature (in the Canary version) is pretty basic but it works, in this link you can see a video with the feature in action:https://t.co/UMAzrWKaWo
— Leopeva64 (@Leopeva64) August 25, 2023
.https://t.co/Wha3AzI9gf pic.twitter.com/z8KMvtUsLI
This may mean that Google is still in the testing phase and that significant development is still required before this feature is widely available to the general public. Google Chrome is not the first browser to introduce such a feature. If you recall, Safari, Edge, and Mozilla Firefox all offer similar storytelling capabilities that are much more sophisticated and feature-rich. For example, you can change the voice of the narrator, the speed of the narration, or skip the narration forward.
With this in mind, you can enable this new Reading Mode feature in your Chrome browser by visiting the Chrome flags page. However, it does not appear in Chrome Canary build version 118.0.5976.0. If you have a chance to try this feature, please let us know your experience in the comments below.
