Listening to text helps concentration while reading but also improves your ability to edit what you wrote. Read Aloud is now a part of Edge, Word and Outlook.
Read Aloud may seem like not that much. It is not an application or a device. It is just a feature. But it is a feature that can transform both your reading and your writing.
It is available across a number of Microsoft apps:
Listening to text has a number of benefits for people reading:
But listening is also a great part of any writer’s toolkit. Everybody should listen to any important text while editing and Read Aloud makes it easy by being integrated directly into Outlook and Word – the two most common apps for creating text.
The main reason to use Read Aloud rather than the alternatives is the high quality of the new Natural voices Microsoft developed. They are head and shoulders above others – particularly when it comes to intonation. And they are available in a number of languages and even accents.
The fact that those same voices are available for free in some of the best and most common applications for reading and writing, makes it an easy choice. It can even be used to listen to PDFs inside the Edge browser and listen on mobile devices, as well.
The biggest inconvenience is that you have to be online while using the Read Aloud feature. Because of the technology involved, it cannot access the natural voices without a connection to the internet.