Questions?
Answered.

Narractor is a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that reads web pages, selections and PDFs aloud in natural voices. It lights up each sentence as it’s read, so you can listen, follow along, or look away.

Not quite. Narractor is coming soon to the Chrome Web Store and Firefox Add-ons. The current build, v0.5.0, is a preview that runs as a developer extension with the Narractor voice server. The store links will be on this site as soon as they’re live.

Chrome and Firefox. Browsers built on Chrome, such as Edge and Brave, usually run Chrome extensions too, but Chrome and Firefox are the two we test and support.

No. The first time you press play, Narractor asks how you want to listen: continue without an account and try it free for 30 minutes, or log in or register, free, for three hours a day on every browser you connect. You log in on narractor.com with Google, or with a code sent to your email, so there’s no password.

Yes. The voice library on the home page plays samples of Narractor’s own narrators. “Try the reading demo” shows the player and highlighting with your browser’s built-in speech, which is separate from Narractor’s voices.

Press the N in your toolbar and hit play, use Alt+Shift+R, or right-click the page and choose Read this page. Narractor finds the article itself and leaves menus, sidebars and link lists out.

Yes. Select some text and a small menu appears: Read selection reads only what you picked, Read from here carries on to the end. Alt+Shift+S reads the selection, and Alt+click on any sentence jumps the voice there.

Anywhere from 0.5× to 2×. Narractor changes the pace, never the pitch, so a fast voice still sounds like itself.

Without an account, 30 minutes in total to try it. With a free account, three hours a day, across all your browsers. Sentences you’ve already heard and play again don’t count, and the day starts again at midnight UTC. Narractor’s user icon shows how much you’ve used.

Yes. Close the card and the voice carries on, with a slim player at the bottom of the page. Pause as long as you like and pick up where you left off.

Yes, both, in Narractor’s settings. The highlight never changes the page itself; it’s drawn on top and disappears when you stop.

Yes, in your browser’s extension shortcut settings. In Chrome that’s chrome://extensions/shortcuts; in Firefox, the gear menu under Add-ons and themes → Manage Extension Shortcuts.

Reader view lifts the article out of a busy page: no ads, no pop-ups, just the text in the size and font you like, with the sentence being read marked as you go. Click any sentence to hear it from there.

Yes. Reader view and the PDF reader can be light, dark, or follow your system. Switch with the moon button or set it once in settings.

Yes. Narractor rebuilds a PDF into a clean article: lines joined into paragraphs, columns put in order, headers and page numbers dropped. The PDF’s bookmarks become a contents sidebar, you can jump to any page, and figures and diagrams stay in place. Equations and code are shown, not read out.

Those work too. Narractor reads the words off the page images right on your computer, page by page, and mixed PDFs are fine. For now, recognising scans works for English text.

Both. Pick a file in the PDF reader and it’s opened in your browser, never uploaded. Password-protected PDFs ask for the password first.

Three original narrators: Documentary, deep and calm; Noir, a tired late-night detective; and Storyteller, warm and British. You can hear each one before you choose.

Yes. We add a real person’s voice only with their permission, and you help decide who we ask first: vote in the poll or name someone.

Ten: English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian. Narractor works out the language from the text itself, even when the page is labelled otherwise.

It tells you plainly instead of guessing, and leaves the page as it was. More languages will come as the voices learn them.

Only the sentences you actually listen to, with your chosen voice, the language and a short-lived login token, go to Narractor’s voice server to become speech. The token lets the server count your listening; it carries no email. They travel encrypted to narractor.com, which checks the login and hands them to the voice server, on graphics cards rented in the EU. Nothing writes the text down, and everything else stays in your browser.

No. There’s no reading history, no analytics and no ad trackers. The details are on the privacy page.

There isn’t one to forget. Every login is either Continue with Google or a fresh 6-digit code sent to your email, so you can always get back in with just your email. If the code doesn’t arrive within a minute, check spam or promotions, then ask for a new one.

Log in on your account page and choose Delete account. Your email is removed at once and every browser is logged out; Narractor then asks again how you want to listen.

Press the user icon in Narractor’s card. Log in or register opens narractor.com: choose Continue with Google, or enter your email and the code we send, then press Connect Narractor. To log out, use the same icon, or log out every browser at once from your account page.

It stores your vote with salted, one-way fingerprints of your browser, device and network, which can’t be turned back into an address. It never asks for your name or email.

Narractor needs its voice server to speak. After a quiet spell it can take a few seconds to wake up, so press play again in a moment; if it keeps happening, check your internet connection. Narractor won’t quietly switch to a robotic fallback voice.

Browsers don’t let extensions read their own pages, such as settings, new tabs and the extension stores. On a normal page, if Narractor can’t find an article, select the text you want and choose Read selection.

Another extension or app may be using the same keys. Check your browser’s extension shortcut settings, or right-click the page and choose Read this page.