Read Aloud
Hear your chapters in a natural voice that runs entirely on your own computer.
Reading your work aloud is one of the oldest editing tricks — your ear catches what your eye skims past. Read Aloud does it for you: a natural-sounding voice reads the current chapter in Single chapter view, or continues through the full book in manuscript order when you are in Continuous manuscript. It highlights and scrolls to each paragraph as it goes. Everything happens on your device. Once the voice is installed there is no internet, no account, and no per-word cost — your manuscript never leaves your computer.
It is entirely optional. The voice is a one-time download you start yourself; until then the feature simply sits quietly out of the way.
Hear the Voices
Four of the built-in voices, each reading the same short line:
Turning It On
- 1Open Settings then Read aloud. Every voice has a preview button, so you can listen before downloading anything.
- 2Press Install to download the voice (about 340 MB, needs ~500 MB free). It runs on most computers and only downloads once.
- 3Once installed, the Read aloud button in the Review menu lights up.
- 4Open it, press play, and follow along. In Continuous manuscript it reads front matter, chapters, and back matter in their book order.
The floating read-aloud player, following along paragraph by paragraph
The Player
- A slim floating bar with play and pause, and skip to the previous or next paragraph
- The paragraph being read highlights and gently scrolls into view
- Continuous manuscript becomes a whole-book listening pass: playback crosses chapter and section boundaries without stopping
- Choose a voice and a reading speed; your choices are remembered
- Choose Prose or Verse for hard line breaks: Prose gives a light beat, while Verse leaves more breathing room for poetry, epigraphs, and lyrics
- A Flag button pauses and drops your cursor on the current paragraph — for catching a line that sounds wrong while you listen
It Says Your Names Right
Invented names are exactly where most read-aloud tools stumble. ChapterMuse uses the pronunciations from your Glossary — so if you have told it how a character or place name should sound, that is how the voice will say it. Multi-word names and variants work too, so one entry can cover a whole place, title, or character name rather than only a single word.
Punctuation Has A Voice
- Full stops, questions, exclamations, commas, colons, semicolons, quotation marks, parentheses, em dashes, and ellipses all reach the voice engine as real punctuation
- An em dash keeps its interrupted or turning-thought beat; three dots and the single ellipsis character are read the same way
- Common titles, initials, manuscript abbreviations, decimals, currency, fractions, ordinals, percentages, ranges, and simple symbols are expanded into speakable English before the voice begins
- All-caps dialogue stays dialogue rather than becoming letter names; established initialisms still spell out, and British voices use British letter names such as zed
Listen with the Flag button close to hand. The moment a sentence stumbles, tap it — the reading pauses and your cursor lands right there, ready to fix. It turns a listen-through into a real editing pass.
Saved Audio & Storage
- Read audio is cached so replaying a chapter is instant; the cache is capped at 100 MB
- The voice and its cache live on your device only — they are never part of a .muse backup
- Manage it in Settings then Storage & data, where you can clear cached audio for a single chapter, a whole book, or everything
See Backup & Storage for the full picture of what lives on your device.