Google Launches Web Version of Read Aloud

Google has launched a web version of the Read Along app to help young children practice reading. The website works with Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge browsers and Android mobile devices, with support for Apple's iOS and more browsers, such as Apple's Safari, coming soon.

Read Along has been available as an Android mobile app for about three years, and in that time Google says the app has helped more than 30 million children around the world read more than 120 million stories.

The website operates in the same way as the mobile app: Children read stories with help from Google's speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies. A virtual assistant named Diya can help with word pronunciations if it detects that they are struggling, and children can also ask Diya for help on their own.

Just like in the app, all the speech processing on the website takes place on the browser locally and no data is sent to Google's cloud or servers. The whole experience is ad-free.

The website works with English, Portuguese, Spanish, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, and Urdu. Google first launched the app in India in 2019 and rolled it out to a wider audience in 2020.</P

Google is reportedly working with two YouTube content providers, ChuChu TV and USP Studios, to bring more stories to the platform and adapt their popular videos to a storybook format.