Speakybara vs Microsoft Edge Read Aloud
Checked October 2, 2026
Speakybara is a free app for Windows and Mac that turns any part of your screen into text you can copy or listen to: press a hotkey, drag a frame, done.
Read Aloud is the free reader built into Microsoft Edge: press Ctrl+Shift+U or right-click a selection to hear a web page or a PDF opened in Edge, with neural voices in about 50 languages, speed control and word-level highlighting.
If what you read lives in a browser tab, Read Aloud is excellent and already installed. Speakybara exists for everything else on the screen — and for the text inside pictures, which Read Aloud cannot see.
- Platforms
- Windows · macOS · iOS · Android
- Shortcut
- CtrlShiftU
Pick Microsoft Edge Read Aloud if
- What you read is a web page, or a PDF you can open in Edge.
- You want it to scroll with you through a long article.
- You do not want to install anything at all.
- You want Immersive Reader's line focus and syllables (F9).
- You need one of the roughly 50 languages Edge covers.
Pick Speakybara if
- The text is outside the browser: Outlook, Teams, Word, a remote desktop.
- The text is inside an image, a scan or a screenshot.
- You want a voice that keeps working without internet.
- Your text switches between Dutch and English mid-paragraph.
- You want the recognised text on your clipboard too.
The eight rows that decide it
The same values as the full matrix, narrowed to this pair.
| What it does | Speakybara | Microsoft Edge Read Aloud |
|---|---|---|
| Works in every app, not only a browser or PDF | yes | noInside Edge only |
| Reads any on-screen text via a screenshot | yesThe text recognition of Windows or macOS, on your computer | no |
| Global hotkey | yesCtrl+Alt+S (Control+Option+S on a Mac), and every hotkey is configurable | partlyCtrl+Shift+U, inside Edge only |
| Premium neural voices | yesEdge neural free on Windows; Google Chirp 3 HD and WaveNet with your own key or Complete | yesOnline only |
| Local or offline voices | yesPiper and the system voices, fully offline | partlyOnly the older, non-natural voices work offline |
| Dutch and English detected automatically | yesPer selection and per sentence; on Windows also per word | partlyLanguage is picked per page, not per sentence |
| Document library or ebook import | no | partlyPDF and EPUB opened inside Edge |
| Price per year | Free · Complete €59 a year incl. VAT, or €6.99 a month | Free |
Price
Read Aloud is free and part of Microsoft Edge, which is part of Windows. Speakybara is free too, and on Windows its Edge voices are those same Microsoft neural voices. Complete, at €59 a year incl. VAT, only buys you Google's Chirp 3 HD voices without setting up a Google Cloud project.
Privacy
Edge's natural voices stream from Microsoft's cloud, so the text of the page goes to Microsoft; offline, Read Aloud falls back to a few older, lower-quality voices. Speakybara's free Edge voices on Windows make exactly the same trade, sentence by sentence — and Piper gives you a fully offline option that Read Aloud does not have. Neither sends an image to be read: Read Aloud never takes one, and Speakybara recognises its capture on your own computer.
Switching
On Windows, switching costs you nothing in voice quality: Speakybara's free Edge voices are the same Microsoft neural voices, Fenna and Maarten included.
Questions people ask
No. Read Aloud reads what is rendered inside Edge: a web page, or a PDF opened in Edge. Mail in Outlook, a Teams message or a dialog box is out of reach.
Usually not. Read Aloud reads the text layer of a document, so an image-based PDF may not narrate at all. Speakybara reads the pixels, so a scan is no different from anything else.
No. Narrator (Win+Ctrl+Enter) is a full screen reader for people who are blind, and it cannot read text inside images either. Speakybara is a read-aloud tool that sits next to Narrator, not a replacement for it.
In Speakybara for Windows, the free Microsoft Edge voices are the same Microsoft neural voices, so the quality is identical. Speakybara adds the offline Piper voices and Google's Chirp 3 HD voices on top; the Mac version has no Edge voices.
Try it before you decide
Speakybara is free, needs no account and takes a minute to install. If it is not for you, the other product is right there.
Sources
SourcesEvery claim on this page was checked against the vendor's own pages on October 2, 2026.
Competitor prices are the list prices the vendor publishes, in US dollars. No competitor publishes a verifiable euro price, so nothing is converted. Speakybara prices are in euros, incl. 21% VAT.
microsoft.com/edge/features (opens in a new tab)
Last updated October 2, 2026