How to Add More Text-to-Speech Natural Voices to Chrome

If you use HoverSpeak with Chrome on Windows, you may notice a smaller set of voices than you'd like, especially if you haven't enabled cloud voices in HoverSpeak options. In this article we will go through how to add additional Google Voices and languages to the Chrome browser, and making them available in HoverSpeak.

The first thing you might think is that you can simply go to Settings > Languages and add additional languages there, expecting the accompanying voices to be included. However, it’s not quite that simple. In practice, adding additional languages to Chrome as of this writing is done in a completely different location.

Step-by-Step: Add Additional Google Cloud Voices to Chrome

Currently the only way of adding additional cloud voices to Chrome is by enabling a Chrome flag. Chrome flags are the pre-release experimental features of Chrome that are not yet available. We will turn one of them on using the steps below.

1) Enable Read-aloud Experimental Chrome Feature

Open a new tab and go to chrome://flags.
Enter the search field, and search for "Reading Mode Read Aloud".
Change the setting to Enabled.
Once you set this flag to enable, a restart button will appear, click it for the settings to take effect. Clicking Restart will restart your browser leaving your open tabs as they were.

Chrome flags settings with Reading Mode Read Aloud enabled — Click to enlarge

2) Open Reading mode

On any article-style page: right-click → Open in reading mode to open the side-panel.

3) Add the language and voices you need

In the Reading mode toolbar, click the Voice Selection icon (it looks like an open mouth talking).
From the drop down select the Languages option.
Turn on the languages you want. Chrome will download Google natural voices for those languages.

Chrome reading mode language selection interface — Click to enlarge

4) Pick the new voices inside HoverSpeak

Open HoverSpeak’s options and you'll see that the languages/voices are already added and available for selection. Go ahead and choose your favorite voice.

Tips & Notes

Important: if Chrome completely restarts, it will usually remove the languages and voices we've added.Reopen the "Reading mode" sidebar (Right-click and select "Open in Reading mode") and the languages and voices would be added back automatically.
Why not Settings → Languages? That area manages Chrome’s UI/translation, not the provisioning of natural TTS voices—those come from Reading mode → Voice → Languages….
Prefer a broader set out of the box? HoverSpeak’s site notes that Edge typically exposes more voices by default; that’s an alternative if you don’t want to change flags in Chrome.

Summary

In this article, we went over how to add more natural text-to-speech voices to Chrome and make them available in HoverSpeak. we talked about This being the only current way of adding additional high quality local google voices to Chrome, To do that, we head to enabled the “Reading Mode Read Aloud” experimental feature of Chrome, From there we were able to download local voices so they can be used in hoverspeak, Unfortunately, this comes with one caveat where a full Chrome restart will cause Chrome to remove these languages until reactivated, but it is a small hurdle which Chrome will probably be fixed in the future.