Select and Speak

Select and Speak is a Google Chrome extension that can help you listen to a certain text by selecting it from the browser's window.  It uses iSpeech's human-quality text-to-speech (TTS) to read any selected text in the browser.

It includes much iSpeech texts to speech voices in different languages., from the most common languages such as English or French to the least known.  You can configure the voice's sex and speed options by changing the settings on the options page, and the premium version even gives access to celebrity voices.

You can change the voice or the playback volume from the Options window. The keyboard shortcut can be changed from the same window. To start using this extension, you have first to select the text you want it to read and then click the icon to start listening.

By default, the extension will try and continuously read, so if to stop listening just click the extension's icon again. A neat feature is that it considers symbols while reading, such as commas.

Note: To install the extension you need to drag and drop the downloaded file in the Extensions tab.