The internet is full of knowledge but unfortunately most of it is available in the text form. You have to read it all if you want to gain your knowledge. But reading so much is not so healthy for your eyes. You can relax your eyes and start listening to webpages instead of reading them by using the free SpeakIt extension for the Google Chrome web browser. This extension converts text into speech and reads it out loud for your listening pleasure.
You can download and install the SpeakIt extension from the Google Chrome webstore site. After the installation is done, you would see a new icon in the toolbar of the Chrome browser. You can right-click on this icon and select Options from the context-menu to open the SpeakIt extension settings. In the settings, you can select the text-to-speech engine from native, SpeakIt or iSpeech. The iSpeech engine has dozens of different types of voices to choose from. You can also select the volume level, speaking rate, shortcut key and speech-to-text feature. The speech-to-text allows you to speak in your microphone to type in your web browser.
After changing the text-to-speech settings, you are now ready to listen to the web. Now you can visit any website in Chrome, select a portion of text that you want to listen to, right-click on the selected text and choose SpeakIt from the context-menu. The SpeakIt extension would immediately start to read the webpage for you. You can lay down on your couch, close your eyes and listen to the webpage.
The number of sentences SpeakIt is going to read out for you are shown in the toolbar icon. You can click on this icon to change the volume level, pause or stop the reading. To pause the reading, you can click on the central pause button. The stop button on the top-left in the popup can be used to abort the reading altogether.
The SpeakIt extention is a great way to go through the contents of a website that offers a lot of reading material like news sites, educational sites, literature sites or Wikipedia. You can reduce the load on your eyes with this useful extension and listen to the webpage content while enjoying your coffee. Another use of this extension is to proofread your writings or posts in your blogs or sites. It will read the misspelled words in a strange way giving you a hint about where you have made a typo.
You can download the SpeakIt extension from https://chrome.google.com/webstore.