Lisen

the framing threw me for a second, "free" here means the extension itself, not the voices, since you still need your own Cartesia plan for the actual TTS calls, right? worth being upfront about that split for anyone who reads "free" and expects it to include the audio generation cost too. does it fall back to a browser-native voice if someone doesn't have Cartesia set up, or is that a hard requirement to use it at all

Building on top of a Cartesia plan the user already has, instead of stacking another subscription, is the detail I like most here. I work on voice AI for older adults at Callie Care, so the accessibility angle jumps out at me: read aloud is a genuine win for people whose eyesight is going, but most tools bury the controls and cap the slow speed at 0.75x, which is still too fast for a lot of 75 year olds. Have you tested Lisen with anyone in that age range, and how far down does your speech rate go?

No extra subscription on top of Cartesia is a pretty straightforward model.

The word highlighting is probably the feature I’d use most Losing your place while listening is annoying.

How does it handle pages with a lot of stuff around the actual article?

The WAV export is interesting Didn’t expect that from a simple read aloud extension.

I like that there’s no Lisen server sitting in the middle of this.

Using your existing Cartesia voices is a really nice touch.

The free part is nice I think the real value is having genuinely pleasant voices for longer reading sessions. How does it handle technical articles?

This could be really handy for long articles when you want to read with yours ears instead of your eyes. How natural does it sound with different types of content?

Free read aloud for any article with your Cartesia voices. No subscription on top of your Cartesia plan.

Listen to any article with your Cartesia voices, free.

Lisen is a free Chrome extension that reads web pages aloud with the Cartesia
voices you already pay for, and costs nothing on top. No subscription, no
account to create.

Reads what you already read. Articles, blog posts, newsletters, documentation,
Substack, Medium, long threads: anything with a body of text on the page.
Listen on the commute, while cooking, or when your eyes have had enough of the
screen.

Follows along on the page. Click the icon on an article and a small player
appears. As it reads, the current passage is tinted and the spoken word is
marked, so you never lose your place.

Start now, or generate the whole thing. Streaming starts speaking as soon as
you press play. Ahead of time generates the full article first, then shows the
exact length and a bar you can scrub. Every number on the player is measured
from the audio; nothing is estimated.

Your account, your voices. Paste your Cartesia API key and pick any voice in
your library, including voices you have cloned or designed there. You pay
Cartesia for what you generate and nothing else.

Save it as audio. Download any article as a WAV. The word timings are stored in
the file, so read-along works when you open it again.

Nothing leaves until you press play. There is no Lisen server. Your key and
settings stay in Chrome on your device. Page text goes to Cartesia only when
you press play, and only from pages where you opened the player. No analytics,
no telemetry.

Do I need a Cartesia account? Yes. Lisen speaks through Cartesia, so you need
an account and an API key from it.

What does it cost? Lisen is free. You pay Cartesia for the speech you
generate, on whatever plan you have with them, which starts with a free tier.