Using the Speak text-to-speech feature

Text-to-speech (TTS) is the ability of your computer to play back written text as spoken words. Depending upon your configuration and installed TTS engines, you can hear most text that appears on your screen in Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

To learn how to configure Excel for text-to-speech, see Converting text to speech in Excel.

What do you want to do?

Enable text-to-speech

Add Speak to the Quick Access Toolbar

Convert text to speech

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Enable text-to-speech

Speak is a built-in feature of Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, and OneNote, in the language of your version of Office. For example, if you are using the English version of Office, the English TTS engine is automatically installed.

To use text-to-speech in different languages, see Using the Speak feature with Multilingual TTS.

Add Speak to the Quick Access Toolbar

You can add the Speak command to your Quick Access Toolbar by doing the following:

1. Next to the Quick Access Toolbar, click Customize Quick Access Toolbar.

   

2. Click More Commands.

3. In the Choose commands from list, select All Commands.

4. Scroll down to the Speak command, select it, and then click Add.

5. Click OK.

6. When you want to use the text-to-speech command, click the icon on the Quick Access Toolbar.

Convert text to speech

After you have added the Speak command to your Quick Access Tool, you can hear single words or blocks of text spoken by highlighting the text you want to hear, and then clicking the Speak command.

Learn More

Using the Save as Daisy add-in

What happened to speech recognition?