Read Aloud

A Chrome extension that reads webpage text aloud with live text highlighting.

It supports two TTS providers:

• Web Speech API (free, uses system/browser voices)
• OpenAI TTS (tts-1 / tts-1-hd with selectable voices)

Features

• Extract main page text or read selected text
• Paste custom text directly into the popup
• Playback controls: play/pause, stop, skip sentence back/forward
• Adjustable playback speed
• Recent text history
• Settings page for provider, voice, and defaults

Setup

1. Clone the project

git clone <your-repo-url>
cd read

2. Load extension in Chrome

1. Open chrome://extensions
2. Enable Developer mode
3. Click Load unpacked
4. Select this project folder (read)

The extension icon should appear in Chrome.

3. (Optional) Configure OpenAI TTS

1. Open the extension popup
2. Click the Settings button
3. Change provider to OpenAI TTS
4. Paste your OpenAI API key (sk-...)
5. Choose model/voice and click Save

If you keep Web Speech API, no API key is required.

Usage

1. Open any webpage
2. Click the extension icon
3. Choose one:
   • Extract Page Text
   • Use Selected Text
   • Paste text into the input box
4. Press Play

Project Structure

• manifest.json - Extension manifest (MV3)
• popup/ - Main popup UI and playback logic
• settings/ - Options page
• background/ - Service worker (OpenAI TTS API call)
• content/ - Content script injection
• lib/ - TTS provider abstractions and implementations

Notes

• OpenAI usage may incur API costs.
• API key is stored in chrome.storage.local.