Although every attempt has been made to ensure the correctness and reasonableness of the information and tools provided here, we remind you that you use this website entirely at your own risk.
All of the teaching tools on this website make use of the speech synthesis capability of recent browsers so that our students may become familiar with spoken American English. To use this capability, click or tap on the button labeled with the 🔊 icon on the tool panels.
As a demonstration, you can tap or click on to launch an instance of the Pronouncer tool. (The tool will not be launchable if you have disabled popups for our website.) Enter some text and press the button with the 🔊 icon on the tool panel to hear the entered text "read" using speech synthesis. (Note that English voices expect valid English words, and, therefore, may "read" incorrectly spelled words incorrectly.) To close the Pronouncer tool panel, simply click on its close button, usually labeled with the × symbol, either on the right or left of its title bar (the topmost strip of its window).
All of the teaching tools are also equipped with voice controls, which are accessed by clicking on the ⓥ label, to the left of the buttons in the tool panel. In most cases, the voice controls will allow you to regulate the speed of the generated speech (from 50% to 100%) and the speech volume (from 0% to 100%, although this may be overridden by your device's controls). Depending upon the browser that you are using, you may also be able to select between two or more voices. We note that some voices—such as that available with the Google Chrome browser—are only available when your device (desktop, laptop, notebook, tablet, smartphone, etc.) has an active Internet connection.
When speech synthesis doesn't work for you, here are a few things to consider:
Check that your device's volume controls have not effectively muted the voice. Apple devices have a "soft mute" that may need to be turned off; to access these settings, "pull" down from the right-hand corner of the screen of your iPad's home screen or up from the bottom of your iPhone's home screen.
Often a simple page refresh will cure the problem. On a desktop, laptop, or notebook computer, click on the ↻ icon in your browser's toolbar. On a tablet or smartphone, a single-finger downward "pull" gesture across your screen should work; if it doesn't, look for the ↻ icon in the menu accessed by tapping on the ⋮ icon.
As mentioned in the previous section, some voices will not be available without an active Internet connection, so if you have disabled WiFi or wireless data, you may not be able to gain access to such voices. The solution in this case is, of course, to turn WiFi or wireless on.
We have successfully tested speech synthesis using recent versions of the Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox browsers on devices that have been purchased in the United States. If you can install one of these browsers onto your device, speech synthesis is more likely to succeed.
If you purchased your device in Ukraine, it may be "localized" for Ukraine, and may need different or additional capabilities to work with English voices. Please be warned that we have no experience with adding US English capabilities to devices purchased outside of the United States, and any changes to your device are made at your own risk. With that disclaimer, we have noted that:
Android devices have a Language management facility that you can access from the Settings → General management → Language and input settings.
Apple devices have a Default Language screen that you can access from Settings → Accessibility → Spoken content → Default Language. Apple devices also make available a rich set of voices in the Voices screen that you can access from Settings → Accessibility → Spoken content → Voices. You can download additional voices; note that this can use a substantial amount of your device's storage. [High-quality voices can require hundreds of MB of storage. You can delete a voice that you have accidentally downloaded as long as you have made some other voice the default (indicated by the checkmark): simply tap the Edit label at the top right of the screen, and then touch the red − sign that appears to the left of the voice you want to delete.]
If none of this information has been useful to you and you have had to resort to solving the problem by yourself consulting other sources, we would be grateful to hear from you: (i) if you were able to get speech synthesis working; and (ii) how you succeeded. Sharing your recipe for success could help other students who use this website.