Hadlee Simons / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google has brought a “listen to this page” feature to Chrome on Android.
- This is a text-to-speech feature that reads out your current webpage.
Google Chrome for Android doesn’t exactly offer loads of accessibility options, but it looks like the web browser has just gained a key feature in this regard.
9to5Google spotted a new “listen to this page” option in Chrome for Android, and I can indeed see the feature in Chrome on my Pixel 7 Pro (version 126.0.6478.71). Check out the images below.
Tap “listen to this page” via the three-dot menu in Chrome and you’ll start text-to-speech (TTS) playback of your current page.
The actual playback widget is full-featured, offering play/pause controls, buttons to skip forward or back, a timeline that can be scrubbed, and playback speed adjustments. Chrome also highlights the spoken passage of text in the article by default, although this can be disabled.
What else to know about the feature?
The “listen to this page” option also offers 10 voice options in English, covering accents for the US, the UK, India, and Australia.
Google confirmed on a support page that other languages are supported too, namely Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. We indeed tried this feature on Spanish, Italian, and French websites and it worked as intended, with several voice options for these languages too.
This feature isn’t available on Chrome for computers just yet, while Microsoft Edge has offered TTS functionality for a while now. So we hope to see a “listen to this page” option on full-fledged desktop Chrome too.
