Turn an open email into a listening session in Chrome or Edge. Hear the message body and follow the highlighted paragraph as it plays.
Open a message, press Listen, and keep your place with paragraph highlighting.
Open an email and press Listen beside its subject. Hear the message body, or expand a reply to continue the conversation.
Listen to your Outlook messages in a desktop browser. Move between messages and use the reading controls beside the email you open.
Open your message in QQ Mail and listen to its readable text while following the highlighted paragraph.
CastReader can also detect messages on other webmail pages. You can select a specific passage when you want to focus on part of an email.
Keep your attention on the email text. CastReader filters common navigation, quoted reply blocks and signatures from the listening flow.
Long emails and newsletters take time to work through. Listening gives you another way to take in the message while paragraph highlighting keeps your place on screen.
Use CastReader in Chrome or Edge with your webmail open. The Listen action appears beside supported messages, keeping the reading controls close to the content.
Open the email you want, press Listen, and follow the highlighted paragraph. To revisit a detail or focus on one reply, expand that reply or select the passage you want to hear.
Choose an available voice that suits the message, whether you are reviewing a work update or catching up on a newsletter. The voice picker shows the options available in your installed extension.
Everything about reading emails aloud
CastReader has dedicated support for Gmail, Outlook.com, Office 365 and QQ Mail, and detects some other webmail pages. Page layouts, permissions and extension versions can affect compatibility or extraction. If a passage is missing or out of order, open the message separately, expand the reply, or select the text you want.
CastReader places a Listen action beside supported messages and combines email-body reading with paragraph highlighting and a choice of voices.
The reading flow filters common quoted reply blocks and signatures. Expand a reply or select a passage when you want to hear that part of the conversation.
You can listen on a laptop with the supported webmail page open in Chrome or Edge. Keep the page available for highlighting. For a phone mail app, use its available accessibility or read-aloud controls.
Yes, you can listen to the readable text in supported newsletters. To focus on one story, select that passage before starting playback.
A free allowance is available. Limits, sign-in requirements and eligible voices depend on the client and feature. Pro requires an account. See your in-product allowance and the current plans and prices.
Open the voice picker in your installed extension to choose a language and voice. It shows the options available for your client, version and plan.
CastReader works with webmail (email in the browser). It does not work with desktop email clients like Thunderbird, Apple Mail, or the Outlook desktop app. For those, use the built-in accessibility features of your operating system.
CastReader is available on iPad and Android tablets, with layouts adapted for a larger reading screen.
Hard numbers — not vibes — from authoritative sources
$2.22 billion
US audiobook sales in 2024, up 13% year-over-year (Publishers Weekly / Audio Publishers Association)
Source →51%
of US adults have listened to an audiobook in 2025 — roughly 134 million people (APA Consumer Survey 2025)
Source →2.2 billion
people globally with near- or far-vision impairment (WHO Fact Sheet, 2024). TTS is the primary access path for digital reading content.
Source →78%
of audiobook listeners multitask while listening — commute, chores, exercise (Audiolibrix Great Audiobook Survey, 2024)
Source →27.2 minutes
average single-trip US commute in 2024, up from 26.8 (US Census ACS via Statista). That's nearly an hour each day of audio-only time.
Source →effect size 0.35
measured comprehension lift from TTS for reading-disabled students across 22 studies (Wood, Moxley, Tighe & Wagner, Journal of Learning Disabilities, 2018)
Source →15.5 million
US adults with ADHD per CDC 2024 — about half diagnosed in adulthood (CDC MMWR, October 2024)
Source →Every Chrome Web Store review below is verifiable at the link in each card. We don't hide negative feedback — we answer it within 24 hours.
“This is 1 of the best TTS and its smooth. If this is truly free i'll keep this 100%. Every other TTS says its free but has a secret. They interrupt or they just say better ai voices pay. But i like this voice. I've tried loads and this is 1 of the best ones that actually says free.”
“Works perfectly on vivaldi. One suggestion though. I wish it had a play button appear next to a paragraph when we hover over it. Just like in the case of speechify.”
“Extremely user friendly short keys. Placed forward backward and speed up down as Natural as it could be. Voices are great and smooth. I would recommend it over many hyped products.”
“At the very least it's better than many paid TTS models. Still not as good as ElevenReader or LAP, but maybe the best free model for TTS.”
“So glad I can finally switch voices! The default was fine but I found one I actually enjoy listening to for hours. Small thing, huge difference.”
“Best one i found, user friendly, and great voice over.”
“ChatGPT's long answers are finally listenable. Let it generate while I listen — doubles my productivity. Love the inline button next to each response.”
“I tried using this add-on to listen to an ebook on the O'Reilly learning platform, and it works smoothly. However, it always restarts from the first paragraph whenever I scroll or select a different paragraph. Please consider adding a bookmark or checkpoint feature so users can mark where the reading should begin.”
↪ Founder reply
Replied by CastReader founder Yan Xu within 48 hours: acknowledged the issue, shipped a bookmark feature in the following release. Reviewer's verbatim feedback drove the v1.2 roadmap.
“Need to highlight text and select it.”
“Hard to select text.”
↪ Founder reply
Replied by CastReader founder Yan Xu within 24 hours: apologized, asked which site/browser the issue occurred on, provided a workaround using the keyboard shortcut, and offered direct support at support@castreader.ai.
We re-test, re-write, and ship continuously. Every entry has a real date.
Rewrote landing pages with verbatim Chrome Web Store testimonials, real audiobook market data, and tested-12-extensions methodology. Every claim now has a sourceable link.
CastReader provides native apps for iPhone and Android; Android downloads are available directly from Google Play.
Wrote up the OCR pipeline: how CastReader handles Amazon's 184 random font alphabets and 361 unique glyphs per Kindle book. Shared in dev.to.
The phone app flow now has its own landing page for bookshelf sync, Read Aloud, synced highlighting, auto-scroll, background playback, and resume progress.
Ranked #10 in Daily, 99 upvotes, 4 community comments shaped the v1.2 roadmap.
Switched from older TTS engines to Kokoro neural voices. User reviews shifted from 'usable but robotic' to 'enjoy listening for hours' (verbatim from review by patrick chiang).
OCR success rate improved from 78% to 89% on English-language Kindle books. Multi-column page detection added for academic PDFs.
I built CastReader because I owned hundreds of Kindle books and couldn't listen to them on my morning runs without buying separate Audible copies. The technical problem — Amazon's Cloud Reader font encryption — turned out to be solvable with OCR. The product problem — making it actually pleasant across different devices and languages — took two years of iteration. We're a small team. I answer every Chrome Web Store review personally (see testimonials above — including the 3-star and 1-star ones). If something's broken or missing, email support@castreader.ai.
— Yan Xu, founder
Last reviewed: · CastReader Team — reviewed against 2025 testing data
Choose Chrome or Edge, open an email, and listen with paragraph highlighting.
Listen to supported articles, Kindle books and AI conversations right on the page.
Your first read in SafariiPhone, iPad, Android phones and tablets
Explore the appCastReader for Mac is available on the App Store for macOS 14.6 or later. The Safari extension is a separate download. CastReader for Windows is available on Microsoft Store.
Available now · macOS 14.6+
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