Text to speech from any Android app, using the share button
Select text anywhere on an Android phone, tap Share, and it lands in the text box ready to be spoken, with no copying and pasting. How it works, what happens to the text, and where it doesn't work.
The slowest part of turning text into speech on a phone isn’t the synthesis. It’s getting the text there. Select, copy, switch apps, find the tab, clear the old text, paste. Six steps before you hear anything, and the paste is the one that goes wrong.
On Android there is a shorter way. Once the tool is installed as an app, it appears in the system Share menu next to your messaging and email apps, and sharing text to it drops that text straight into the box.
How to use it
- Install it once. In Chrome, open the site, tap the menu, and choose Install app. This is the step that adds it to the share menu. Without it, the tool doesn’t appear there.
- Select some text in any app: a web page, an email, a PDF, a note, a message.
- Tap Share, then pick wordtospeech. The first time, it may be tucked under More.
- The tool opens with your text in the box. Pick a voice, press Speak, and listen.
- Download what you need: the MP3, and the matching SRT or VTT subtitle file with every cue timed to the spoken words.
That last step is the reason this is more than a read-aloud button. A phone can already read text to you. What it can’t easily do is hand you an audio file and a subtitle file that line up, ready to drop into a video editor. How the timings are made explains why they match the speech, rather than being guessed from the length of the text.
Sharing a whole page
You don’t have to select text first. Sharing a web page from Chrome’s own share button sends its title and its address. The tool keeps the title and drops the address, because a voice reading out “h-t-t-p-s colon slash slash” is of no use to anyone. To hear the page’s content, select the part you want before tapping Share.
Long selections are cut to the 5,000-character limit for a single request, the same limit as typing or pasting. The character counter under the box shows exactly what you have.
What happens to the text you share
Sharing only fills the box. Nothing is sent to be spoken until you press Speak, so you can read it over, trim it, or close the app without anything leaving your phone.
The shared text arrives in the page’s address, because that’s how Android hands text to a web app. The tool takes it out of the address first thing, before any analytics loads, so it never reaches Google Tag Manager as part of a page address. When you press Speak, the text is handled exactly as typed text is, and the privacy page says what that means.
Where it doesn’t work
iPhone and iPad. Apple doesn’t let web apps appear in the share sheet, installed or not. On iOS the route is still copy and paste. Everything else works the same once the text is in.
Windows and Mac. Desktop browsers there don’t offer this kind of sharing to installed web apps either. On a computer, the installed app gives you its own window, and paste is the way in.
Android without installing. The share entry belongs to the installed app. If you only ever open the site in a tab, it won’t be in the menu.
When it earns its place
Most of the time this saves you ten seconds, and that’s all. It matters when you do it repeatedly: someone turning a batch of written posts into short captioned clips, a teacher sending a passage at a time, a learner hearing sentences from an article in another language. Sentence by sentence, the copy-switch-paste loop is what makes people give up and stop, and the share button removes it.