Read Any Language

• ✓Reads in the text’s own language automatically — no language setting, and no wrong-accent robot voice mangling a foreign sentence.
• ✓Natural ElevenLabs voices from your own account, not the flat built-in system TTS most reader extensions fall back to.
• ✓Bring-your-own-key with nothing in between — your text and key go only to ElevenLabs; there’s no developer server in the middle logging what you read.
• ✓Highlight-to-listen on any site — a floating button on any selection, rather than a whole-page reader you have to launch.

I read Chinese websites — and every so often I hit a character I can't pronounce and just want to hearit. And for the languages I am learning — Indonesian and Spanish — I don't want to read a sentence, I want to hear the whole thing spoken with real warmth and emotion, not the flat, robotic text-to-speech built into the browser.

The workaround was always the same clumsy dance: copy the text, paste it into some text-to-speech site, pick the language, hit play. So I built the thing I wanted instead: highlight any text, on any page, in any language, click once, and hear it — with the extension detecting the language for me.

The first version did one thing well: watch for a text selection on the page, pop a floating 🔊 button beside it, and on click send the text to ElevenLabs and play the audio back. A single multilingual model meant there was no language picker — it just matched whatever you highlighted. Your own API key, saved locally. No accounts, no backend, no build step.

• Always the latest models and voices

  The model and voice lists are pulled live from ElevenLabs, not hardcoded — so the moment ElevenLabs ships a newer text-to-speech model (and with it broader language coverage) or adds new voices, they appear in settings automatically, no extension update required. Pick a model, see the languages it supports, and preview any voice with one click before you commit.

• A spend guard

  A per-selection character limit — with a live count on the button (“842 / 1000 chars”) — stops a giant accidental highlight from burning through your quota. The same cap is enforced again in the background, so an oversized request never even fires.

• Speaks your language, too

  Reading foreign text is the whole point — so it felt wrong for the extension’s own settings and popup to sit in English. The interface now localizes itself to the browser’s language across 30 locales — Arabic and Hebrew through Hindi, Thai, Japanese and Chinese — right-to-left layouts included, using Chrome’s built-in i18n so there’s no runtime cost.

The decision I keep coming back to wasn't a feature — it was choosing not to sit in the middle of anyone's data.

Read Any Language is published and installable from the Chrome Web Store: highlight text on any page, click the 🔊 button, and hear it in its own language through a natural ElevenLabs voice — with your key kept local, your quota in view, and — as of v1.2 — an interface that localizes itself into 30 languages. It's the tool I actually reach for to read through the languages I'm still learning.