Google Chrome will get a new feature that will allow users to listen to the content of web pages. This feature is currently available in a preview version of the Chrome Canary app, but may soon be available to all. This is reported by one of the users of X.
According to X social network user Leopeva64, who discovered the innovation, when a page is opened in reading mode, a playback button appears at the top of the page, and when you click on it, Google’s voice synthesizer voices the open text.
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
.https://t.co/Wha3AzI9gf pic.twitter.com/z8KMvtUsLI– Leopeva64 (@Leopeva64) August 25, 2023
So far, the text-to-speech function in the reading mode does not work very well: the voice sounds very much like a robot, and it perceives words written in capital letters as abbreviations and reads them spelling by spelling, not as a whole.
It is also unknown whether Google plans to add support for languages other than English.