Support

This is the problem we hear about most, and we will not pretend you set something wrong. It is ours.

What gets you moving again: press play once more and it continues from the next sentence. If it keeps breaking on the same page, select the paragraph with the mouse, right-click and choose Read It To Me. A selection stays put even when the page around it reloads itself.

We do not yet know every page that triggers it. If you send us the address where it happened, you move the fix forward more than you think.

Reload the page and press play again. A page that was already open when you installed or updated the extension has not met it yet — a reload introduces them.

If a reload does not help, try a plain article on another site. That tells us whether the problem is the extension or that one page, and it is the first thing we will ask.

Chrome puts background tabs to sleep to save power, and a sleeping tab stops speaking. Keep the tab you are listening to in front, or move it to its own window.

If it stops while the tab is in front and awake, that is a different fault and we want to hear about it. Tell us the page and roughly how far in it stopped.

It moved to the side panel on the right. It stays open while you scroll, type and click around the same tab, which the old drop-down could not do.

Click the extension icon to open it. If you do not see the icon, it is hiding under the puzzle-piece button in Chrome's toolbar — open that and pin Read It To Me.

The side panel is a Chrome feature that arrived in Chromium 114. Some browsers built on Chromium either lack it or run on an older base — Avast Secure Browser is the one people have written to us about. There the text still reads aloud, but pause and speed have nowhere to appear.

Our honest answer today: Chrome and browsers on a recent Chromium are where every control works. If you are on something else, write and name it. We count those messages.

It does. The highlight appears on the page in the tab, not inside the side panel, and the page scrolls along to keep the current sentence in view.

If the page stays unmarked while the voice reads, tell us the address — that is a fault, not a setting.

The list shows the Google voices and nothing else. We filter out the voices installed on your computer. On many machines that list fills with joke voices and robotic leftovers, and people were picking them by accident. The Microsoft natural voices got caught in the same filter.

That was our decision, not a fault. We are reconsidering it: let the good ones in by name, instead of opening the door to everything. If you want the Microsoft voices back, say so. Two people already have.

The interface speaks 54 languages. The voices are the ones Chrome provides, and that list is shorter. If your language is missing from the voice list, Chrome has no voice for it on your computer. Installing voices in your operating system will not bring them in either — the filter described above keeps them out.

Latin American Spanish is the request we get most. Tell us which voice you expected and on which system, and it goes on the list we work from.

Speed is in the side panel, and it starts slightly above normal. Several people have told us the range does not go far enough for them.

Guessing is how we would get this wrong. So we are asking instead: what speed do you read at? Send a number and we will set the range from real answers.

Open the PDF in Chrome and press play — PDFs are read, whatever older reviews in the store still say.

One kind of PDF genuinely cannot be read: a scan. If the file is a photograph of a page, there are no letters in it, only an image of letters. Test it by dragging the mouse across a word — if nothing highlights, it is a scan, and no reader can speak it.