‘Read to me’ books come to Chrome

Dan AmosNews, Online

Have your book read to you with one click - new in Book Creator for Chrome and all books published online.

We’re super excited to bring ‘Read to me’ to Book Creator for Chrome today. With this great new feature your books can be read aloud using your device’s text-to-speech capabilities. Book Creator can highlight the words as they are read and turn the pages automatically.

Try it out now with the books below.

Note: ‘Read to me’ works with Chrome, Safari, and Edge browsers only. More details here.

We’ve also added a bunch of settings so you can choose a language or voice, control the speed of reading, and auto-play any media. These settings are available both when creating books in the app, and when they are published online.

Screenshot of 'Read to me' settings as viewed on a MacBook

Improved accessibility

‘Read to me’ is part of our ongoing commitment to the Universal Design for Learning framework and ensuring that Book Creator works for all learners. With this update we have also significantly improved the accessibility of book reading when used with a screen reader.

How will you use it?

In our iPad app, 'Read to me' is incredibly popular already - it was used over 600,000 times last month alone. We can envisage so many uses for ‘Read to me’ with younger students, foreign language teaching and the special ed classroom.

Let us know how you plan to use it in the comments below!

Happy book making,
Dan

Start using Book Creator for Chrome

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5 Comments on “‘Read to me’ books come to Chrome”

  1. major glitch for foreign users, the local voice is automatic, I’ve just heard the worse French accent reading the ENglish text of the book given as example. Would it be possible to add the choice of the language in the menu?

  2. Is there a way that you can record your own voice instead of the computer generated sounding one and have the words highlighted also. I found the option but the highlighted words did not match up with the text. And the computer generated one sounds too strange.

    1. You can record audio hotspots to have your own voice reading the text, but you can’t have that at the same time as word highlighting, sorry.

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