Skip to main content

Voice and Playback Settings - Personal Version

Set your preferred voice, adjust reading speed, use advanced playback tools, and manage pronunciation.

Kim Smith avatar
Written by Kim Smith
Updated this week

NaturalReader AI Text to Speech - Personal Version lets you personalize your listening experience by selecting from a wide range of voices and languages. You can adjust speed, add a second voice, and even create your own pronunciation rules.



Choose a Voice and Language

To choose a voice, click or tap the voice icon in the toolbar.

  • On web, it's located in the top toolbar.

  • On mobile, it's located in the bottom toolbar.

At the top of the voice settings panel is a language drop-down menu. By default, this is set to Multilingual (Auto-detect).

  • Multilingual voices can automatically detect the language of your content and read accordingly.

  • If the voice switches languages or accents unexpectedly, select the voice from a specific language list instead for more stable results.

You can change the drop-down menu to browse specific language and accent categories (e.g. English (US), French (France), etc).

Multilingual voices will also appear in the specific language lists they support.

Voice Types and Tabs

Voices are grouped into categories, shown as tabs in the voice settings:

  • Pinned – Your favourite voices that you've pinned for easy access

  • Plus – AI voices, including multilingual

  • Free – Basic, non-AI voices

  • Premium – Higher-quality, non-AI voices

  • Cloned – Custom voices you’ve created (AI, multilingual)

  • Community – Cloned voices shared by other users (AI, multilingual)

Note: Cloned and Community voices are considered Plus Voices and follow the same usage rules.

The number of characters you can listen to per day depends on your plan and the voice type. For more details, see:


Pin a Voice

You can pin your favourite voices so they’re easier to find later.

To pin a voice on web and mobile:

  • Open voice settings by clicking or tapping the voice icon.

  • Click or tap the pin icon next to any voice name.

Pinned voices appear under their own Pin tab in the voice settings.
To unpin a voice, click or tap the pin icon again.


Adjust Voice Speed

You can adjust how fast the voice reads by modifying the speed setting.

On web and mobile:

  • Click or tap the speed display (e.g. 1x) in the playback bar to open the speed settings.

    • On web, hovering over the speed display shows a tooltip labeled “Speed.”

This will always open the panel to the Speed tab by default. In the Speed tab:

  • The default reading speed is 1x, which equals 180 words per minute (WPM).

  • The exact WPM is shown as you adjust the speed (e.g. 1.73x = 311 WPM).

  • The minimum speed is 0.28x (50 WPM) and the maximum is 5x (900 WPM).

  • You can:

    • Click or tap and drag the slider to change speed

    • Select a preset speed

    • Click or tap the + and – buttons to fine-tune incrementally


Advanced Playback Settings

For more control over how text is read aloud, click or tap the speed display (e.g. 1x) to open the speed settings panel. In addition to adjusting speed, you’ll find four other tabs that let you customize playback behaviour in more detail.

Speed

  • Adjust how fast the voice reads using a slider, presets, or the + / – buttons.

  • The speed is shown both as a multiplier (e.g. 1.5x) and in words per minute (e.g. 270 WPM).

  • Range: 0.28x (50 WPM) to 5x (900 WPM).

(See Adjust Voice Speed above for full details.)

Readers

You can add a secondary voice that alternates with the primary voice, either by sentence or paragraph. This is ideal for reading dialogue or giving different parts of a document distinct voices.

To set up a secondary voice:

  1. Go to the Readers tab.

  2. Click or tap to toggle Secondary Reader on.

  3. Use the language drop-down to select the language for the secondary reader.

  4. Use the voice type drop-down (e.g. Plus) to select the voice category, then choose a voice name.

  5. Use the final drop-down to select whether to alternate by sentence or paragraph.

Repeat

You can set each sentence to repeat automatically before moving on to the next. This feature is especially helpful for language learners who want extra reinforcement.

To use:

  1. Go to the Repeat tab.

  2. Use the drop-down menu to select how many times to repeat each sentence (between 1 and 5 times).

Pause

NaturalReader already includes brief automatic pauses between sentences and paragraphs. This setting allows you to manually increase those pause durations.

To use:

  1. Go to the Pause tab.

  2. Use the drop-down menu for sentence pauses to choose a delay between 0 (default) and 5 seconds.

  3. Use the drop-down menu for paragraph pauses to choose a delay between 0 (default) and 5 seconds.

This is useful if you prefer a slower pacing or need more time to process each segment.

More

Adjust the playback volume independently from your device’s system volume.

To use:

  1. Go to the More tab.

  2. Click or tap and drag the volume bar to set the level anywhere between 0% and 100%.


Pronunciation Editor

The Pronunciation Editor allows you to control how specific words or phrases and other elements (like acronyms, abbreviations etc.) are spoken. This can be useful for correcting mispronunciations, adjusting names, or tailoring the reading to your preferred style.

To access on web and mobile:

  • Click or tap the menu (three dots) > Pronunciation.

Here you can view current entries, delete them, export/import settings, and add new ones.

To add a new entry:

  1. Enter the word, phrase, or element you want to modify into the Source Word field.

  2. Enter an alternate spelling (you can spell it phonetically) in the Replace field.

  3. Press the Play button to preview how it will sound.

    • You may need to try a few different spellings to get the result you want.

    • Some voices may pronounce the same entry differently.

  4. Use the drop-down menu to preview with a different voice (defaults to the voice currently selected).

  5. Click or tap the settings icon to adjust advanced options:

    • Match Case: Makes the rule case sensitive. Without it, the modification will apply to both capitalized and lowercase versions of the entry.

    • Ignore Word Boundary: Modify a source word even when it is attached to punctuation or other text.

      • For example, to replace every period (.) with the word “period,” this must be enabled—otherwise periods at the ends of sentences will not be modified.

  6. When you're satisfied, click or tap Add to save the entry.

Managing entries:

  • Entries cannot be edited. To make changes, delete the existing rule and re-add it.

  • Use the import/export icons to save or load your pronunciation rules as a .json file.


Did this answer your question?