The little control panel will have 5 controls: Previous, Play/Pause, Next, Settings, and Stop. This will launch the Read Aloud controls at the top right corner of your open document, under the Ruler, and start reading the content automatically. Then, go to the ‘Review’ tab and click the ‘Read Aloud’ button in the ribbon or simply press Alt+ Ctrl+ Space. Next, place the cursor where you want to start listening from or highlight the text that you want to be read aloud. Access Read Aloud in Microsoft Wordįirst, open the document you want to read aloud in Microsoft Word. It uses auto-scroll to move from word to word, line by line, and paragraph to paragraph to read and reads the content out loud. Starting from where you placed the cursor, it reads one word at a time and highlights each word when reading it aloud. In Microsoft 365, you can choose from over 142 different voices. If you want to hear the content of your document in natural-sounding voices, you will need a Microsoft 365 subscription and an internet connection. The offline versions of Word 20 only have three different voices. It will either read the content starting from wherever you placed the cursor or it will read only the highlighted text. There are two ways the Read Aloud reads out your content. Read Aloud is an advanced tool that uses the Windows enhanced Narrator and Accessibility technology to play back written text as spoken words. If you want to find out more about Word’s Read Aloud feature and how to use it, read on. While ‘Read Aloud’ can read you any and all parts of your document, the Speak feature can only read the selected text. This feature is very useful for readers with learning disorders and visual impairment.ĭon’t confuse ‘Read Aloud’ with another text-to-speech feature called ‘Speak’ in Microsoft Word.

Plus, listening to a document can improve your comprehension, learning pronunciations, and language skills if the document is not in your primary language. Sometimes, listening to a document can help you find errors, repetitive words, or clumsy words that you may have missed or skipped over while editing or reading the document. Read Aloud is only available in the versions of Office 2019, Office 2021, and Microsoft 365. However, you will need a Microsoft 365 subscription to use the natural-sounding voices, otherwise, you will have to use the three default voices. It is a wonderful tool that reads the contents of your Word document in more realistic and natural-sounding voices. Read Aloud is a new powerful text-to-speech feature built into Microsoft Word that reads out documents to you. Everything you need to know about the Read Aloud feature in Microsoft Word, Word Online, and Word Mobile.

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