A couple of months ago I discovered a new text to speech tool called Voicepods. When I first tried it and wrote about it Voicepods would only create voice recordings based on text that you wrote. This week Voicepods launched a free Chrome extension that will let you have the text of any webpage read aloud. There are other Chrome extensions that do the same. What makes Voicepods different is that while Voicepods reads the text of webpage it also makes a recording that you can save and playback whenever you want. Watch my demonstration video to see how the Voicepods Chrome extension works.

As you can see the video, Voicepods has another new feature. That feature is called “read along.” Read Along highlights the words in a block of text while they are being read aloud.

Applications for Education

The new Voicepods Chrome extension could be a good one for students who need some help with pronunciation of words while reading a webpage. The extension has support for ten languages which could make it useful in ELL/ ESL classrooms.