Read Aloud

One of my favorite browser-based features is Reading Mode and specifically, the Read Aloud tool. If you’re not familiar, the former is a view of the page you’re reading that strips away all of the non-essential bits (graphics, taglines, links, ads) so that you can focus on just reading the content. It also increases the text size, widens the kerning/leading, and employs a host of other techniques to basically just make the content more readable. And by and large this works extremely well for articles on this site.

The latter, Read Aloud, uses a text-to-speech (TTS) voice to actually read the content to you verbally. In this case, I’m referring to the read aloud feature built into Edge, but just about every modern browser has a similar tool/capability. I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve read during a commute, while making breakfast, or even in the shower (😳) thanks to this feature. For me, as a content author myself, The best bit of this whole process is that, aside from just being somewhat careful about how you write the article, there’s no additional overhead; that is, neither Paul, Laurent, nor Brad don’t have to write (or record) a separate version of their articles to make this work. Heck, I’ve even used this feature to playback some of the more interesting forum posts!

One idea I have around this would be to make the experience a little more personal…I wonder whether the original author Could create an AI-powered digital twin using their voice to actually narrate the articles in Read Aloud mode. I mean, the Microsoft-provided voices aren’t bad by any stretch but imagine how cool it would be if you could actually hear the article being read back to you in an approximation of the author’s voice. I imagine at present an AI model would have to be trained and the author would need to go through some manual process to “record” an audio version of the article to exist somewhere on the page, but I just wonder how far off we are from seeing a feature like this added to the browser natively.