Google is experimenting with text-to-speech technologies in read mode in Chrome; The desktop version of the browser will be able to read open pages aloud. This possibility has appeared in the previous version of the program until now.

The text-to-speech functionality in reading mode was noticed by the user of the X (formerly Twitter) social network Leopeva64 – it appeared in the previous build of Chrome Canary. When you open a page in reading mode, a play button will appear at the top of the page, click it and the Google voice synthesizer will speak the clear text.

Judging by the published video showing the new function, its capabilities are still quite limited: The voice is very similar to a robot, and it perceives capitalized words as abbreviations and reads them letter by letter, not literally. The feature is currently only available to some users and it is unclear how it will reach the public version of the browser. But there is hardly any reason to doubt that this will happen; this possibility is already implemented in Microsoft Edge.

The text-to-speech feature in reading mode will be a sought-after feature among those who are better at hearing information. And I hope that before the public version of Google Chrome is released with such an opportunity, the sound will come out a little more alive than it is now.