Narration voices

SublimeRead narrates with natural, lifelike voices, made with a little AI under the hood so they sound human, with nothing to install. Three voices are free; the rest come with a Reader plan. On some browsers it falls back to the text-to-speech voices on your device; this page covers both.

SublimeRead's voices

On supported browsers, the reader narrates with a set of natural English voices that you pick from the voice panel. There's nothing to download or install; just open a book and press play. English for now; more may come later.

Using your device's voices

On some older browsers, SublimeRead falls back to the text-to-speech voices installed on your device. The voice panel then lists whatever your device exposes, and you can add more in your system settings (below). The “enhanced”, “natural”, or “premium” voices each platform offers usually sound far better than the defaults.

macOS

System Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content. Open the System voice menu and choose Manage Voices… (“Customize” on older macOS). Tick the voices you want (search by language or region and press Play to sample), then click OK. Any voice that isn't already on your Mac downloads from Apple. See Apple's guide.

iPhone & iPad

Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → Voices. Choose a language and voice, then pick an Enhanced (or premium) quality option; on Wi-Fi it downloads automatically. See Apple's guide.

Windows

Settings → Time & language → Language & region. Next to a language, open ⋯ → Language options, then under Language features → Text-to-speech click Download. The new voice becomes available to your browser after it finishes. See Microsoft's guide.

Android

Settings → Accessibility → Text-to-speech output. Tap the settings icon next to your engine (usually Google Text-to-speech), choose Install voice data, then pick a language to download. See Google's guide.

Good to know

After installing, reload SublimeRead or reopen the book so the reader re-scans your voices, then choose the new one in the voice panel.

Availability depends on your browser. Chrome, Edge, and Safari all expose your system voices; a few specialised voices (for example Windows Narrator's “natural” voices) are reserved for the operating system and may not appear to web apps. On desktop Chrome you may also see Google's own online voices (their names start with “Google”) with nothing to install.

Still stuck, or want a voice we should highlight? Let us know.