Free TXT Reader
Listen to Text Files
Listen to your Text files like audiobooks, chat with content, track progress, highlight key points, and save bookmarks — all in one place.
Opens in the ReadLoudly reader. Free, no signup.
Hear the voices before you listen
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How to listen to your Text files.
Listening to your Text files hands-free is simple with ReadLoudly.
Upload Your File
Upload the Text files you want to listen to.
Choose Your Page
Open your file and jump to the page you want to hear.
Press Play & Listen
Hit play and let ReadLoudly read it aloud—hands-free.
What is a TXT file?
A TXT file is plain text: characters and line breaks, nothing else. No fonts, no images, no page layout — which is exactly why it is the most portable document format there is. Every operating system since the 1970s can open one, and every text editor, terminal and programming tool writes them.
ReadLoudly's TXT reader opens .txt files in the browser, keeps the paragraph breaks, and reads the text aloud with AI voices. Because there is no layout to interpret, plain-text files load instantly and narrate cleanly — no headers, footers or page numbers to trip over.
Where TXT files come from
- Public-domain books — Project Gutenberg and similar archives distribute thousands of novels as plain text
- Transcripts and captions — exported meeting notes, interview transcripts and subtitle drafts
- Developers and sysadmins — README files, logs, changelogs and configuration notes
- Writers — drafts kept in distraction-free editors, or exported from Scrivener and iA Writer
- Copied web articles — text saved from a browser to read later without the page clutter
Why listen instead of read?
Plain text carries no visual structure, so a long .txt file is tiring to read on screen: no headings stand out, no page breaks pace you. Hearing it read aloud restores the rhythm — the voice pauses at every paragraph and sentence — and lets you get through a 400-page Gutenberg novel or a 2-hour transcript on a walk instead of at a desk.
Features
- UTF-8 and legacy encodings: accented characters, Cyrillic, CJK and Arabic text display and narrate correctly
- Windows (CRLF) and Unix (LF) line endings both preserved as paragraph breaks
- Files up to 10 MB — several million characters — in one upload
- 50+ free browser voices, 1,200+ premium natural voices on paid plans
- Adjustable reading speed (0.5x to 3x) with word highlighting
- Bookmarks and highlights so you can pick up where you stopped
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about Free TXT Reader.
Yes. UTF-8 files in any script are read correctly, and you can pick a voice in the matching language. Files saved in older single-byte encodings are converted on upload.
The reader treats blank lines as paragraph breaks and sentence punctuation as pauses. A file with hard line breaks at every 80 characters is joined back into sentences before narration.
Yes — for pasted text, use the text to speech tool, which is the same reader with a text box in front of it.
Yes — the TXT to PDF converter gives you a paginated file, useful for printing or sharing a fixed layout.
Listen With Voices That Feel Real
With ReadLoudly.com, you can easily upload any PDF document and read.
Once you're done reading or listening to a document, you can easily share.
Share with Ease
Once you're done reading or listening you can easily share.
Multilingual AI Chat
Chat with PDFs, adjust voice, and translate to your language.
No Downloads Required
You don't need to download any software or plugins to use.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about Free TXT Reader.
Upload your .txt file or paste text directly into ReadLoudly's TXT reader. Choose a voice and press play — your text is read aloud instantly with natural AI narration. Free, no account needed.
Yes. ReadLoudly's text-to-speech tool lets you paste any text directly and listen immediately. No file upload needed — just paste and play.
Free users can convert up to 5,000 characters per session. Core, Plus and Pro plans unlock far higher limits with no session cap.
Yes. ReadLoudly detects UTF-8 and common legacy encodings, so accented, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic and CJK text loads correctly rather than turning into replacement characters.
Yes. Reading and listening to TXT files is free, with no account required to start and no watermark on anything. Paid plans — Core at $5/month, Plus at $10/month, Pro at $19/month — raise the upload size limit, unlock all 1200+ AI voices, add MP3 downloads and offline listening, and remove ads.
Yes — TXT is fully supported on this page, and it is one of 24 formats ReadLoudly reads aloud: documents (PDF, DOCX, ODT, RTF), ebooks (EPUB, MOBI, AZW, FB2, CHM, LRF, LIT, PDB, RB), text and web files (TXT, HTML), comics (CBR, CBZ), and images (via OCR) (JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, WEBP, TIFF, SVG). Upload a TXT file here and it opens straight away; any other format on that list has its own reader page.
Yes. This reader runs in the mobile browser on iOS and Android — nothing to install — so you can open a TXT file straight from your phone's Files app, an email attachment or a cloud drive. Playback continues in the background, and your position syncs to any other device you sign in on.
It is parsed to extract its text, then removed from the processing servers. ReadLoudly does not train models on your files, does not share them with third parties, and does not make them visible to anyone else. Signed-in users can choose to keep a TXT file in their own private library; a guest upload is discarded when the session ends.
TXT is plain text with no formatting layer at all. ReadLoudly opens it directly in the browser, so you do not need the original software that created it.
Every format gets its own reader page rather than being funnelled into one generic uploader, so nothing loses its format-specific handling. Nearest neighbours to TXT among ReadLoudly's text and web files: HTML. The Tools page lists all of them.
Read more on the blog
Guides and comparisons from the ReadLoudly blog on getting more out of listening to your documents.
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