Microsoft Edge Read Aloud NOT WORKING to read PDFs - no person can fix this!!! HELP!!!

Question

Read Aloud worked this afternoon. Now when I open a PDF document and click Read Aloud, it just loads and loads and loads. The answers in the current support to this question are useless. "Check your volume," "Check your volume here," "Check your volume there." The problem has NOTHING to do with volume! NO FIX anywhere - same question dating back to 2020 on some Microsoft forums! And you can't uninstall/troubleshoot Edge because you've disabled uninstall! Through hours and hours of trying to get Edge's Read Aloud to work - and losing tons of money - a person makes a vow: "Never use Microsoft Edge as your default browser." When you're at a party, and people are talking about browsers, warn them to never, ever, ever use Microsoft Edge. I'm very close to buying AI software to read my PDFs to me because I'm so irritated. Yes, it reads a web page's text - it will not read a PDF back to you! What is wrong with YOUR product? Why are people still struggling with this? Do you want the public to go crazy? FIX the problem!!!!

Answer 1

Hi @Natalie Wilkinson,

The Read aloud feature in Microsoft Edge Chromium are implemented in the Microsoft Voice (Speech Recognition) component/extension. You can enter "edge://components/" in the address bar of Edge and find Speech Recognition to check its update status. In addition, you can also enter "edge://extensions-internals/" in the address bar and search for the key id ("id": "jdiccldimpdaibmpdkjnbmckianbfold") for more information.

As per the current design, the Microsoft Voices (Speech recognition) component/extension is loaded into the Edge frame browser process and requires persistent WebSocket connections to speech.platform.bing.com (on ports 80 and 443) in order to function as expected.

So, the resolution is to allow direct and persistent connections to speech.platform.bing.com for ports 80 and 443.

If read aloud still doesn't work, you can press "Alt+Shift+I" to submit feedback.

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Best regards,

Jinxin Wang