A program or app that reads Chinese for you? (to help with pronunciation)

[Zandareagle]

I currently use the excellent Zhongwen plugin for Chrome to highlight and understand words in Chinese webpages as part of my study. However, it has one glaring shortcoming...there is no accompanying pronunciation.

 

While my pinyin is not too bad and I can generally get the correct meaning from the pronunciation provided, nothing beats actually hearing the words spoken. Does anyone know of a program that would read a webpage or text file on mouse-over? 

[Luxi]

MDBG's Chinese Reader 8 will do that, but it's not free. It adds an extension to Chrome or Firefox, but somehow it also works with Edge without adding anything, go figure! In all cases, it uses Microsoft's excellent voices. It can 'speak' word by word selections, a selected text passage or the whole text. You can install it for a 2-weeks trial. The link below gave me a warning with Chrome (possibly something to do with expired certificates), but it opened safely and well with Windows 10's Edge.

https://mdbg.loqu8.com/

 

An alternative is Google Translate. You can paste copies of the words / text you want read onto the window in a Google Translate tab. It seems able to cope with long chunks of text. The voice isn't too bad though not as good as Microsoft's, but I think you can adjust it in the Chrome settings to make it better.

[Zandareagle]

I have tried that and I like the program...but unfortunately not enough to purchase it.  I was sort of looking for an alternative that worked on mouse-over.

 

Google Translate is a decent enough standby. 

[werewitt]

If you click on the speaker icon in the left bottom corner on Google Translate, it will read to you. https://translate.google.com/#zh-CN/en/欢迎. I prefer Baidu's TTS to Google's, though. http://tts.baidu.com/text2audio?lan=zh&ie=UTF-8&text=你在干什么

[Zandareagle]

What's Baidu's TTS? I click on it and all I get is a sound file. 

 

I know about Google Translate but I was searching for a mouse-over thing.

[werewitt]

Best of luck @Zandareagle 

It seems you're looking for a free piece of software that requires zero user intervention yet still reads books aloud. I'd recommend a Chinese native gf/bf but they are not cheap in the long run either.