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

Question

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

Natalie Wilkinson 20

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!!!!

Jinxin Wang (Shanghai Wicresoft Co Ltd) 2,195 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff

2024-04-11T08:47:45.27+00:00

Hi @Natalie Wilkinson,

May I know if the issue has been resolved?
Lara p 0 Reputation points

2024-04-29T11:55:57.84+00:00

This has not worked for me.
Zach Rubemeyer 0 Reputation points

2024-12-24T02:11:41.08+00:00

It's wild we're all still having this issue and Microsoft has not been able to resolve it. The internet is chalked full of customers with similar issues and yet, here we remain. It's like we (the customers) are all somehow uniquely experiencing this issue and every "technical experts' advice" tells us to chase down some white rabbit because they cannot understand the issue we all are experiencing.

3 answers

Your answer

Jinxin Wang (Shanghai Wicresoft Co Ltd) 2,195 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff

2024-04-11T08:47:45.27+00:00

Hi @Natalie Wilkinson,

May I know if the issue has been resolved?
Lara p 0 Reputation points

2024-04-29T11:55:57.84+00:00

This has not worked for me.
Zach Rubemeyer 0 Reputation points

2024-12-24T02:11:41.08+00:00

It's wild we're all still having this issue and Microsoft has not been able to resolve it. The internet is chalked full of customers with similar issues and yet, here we remain. It's like we (the customers) are all somehow uniquely experiencing this issue and every "technical experts' advice" tells us to chase down some white rabbit because they cannot understand the issue we all are experiencing.

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.

If the answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

Best regards,

Jinxin Wang

Joanna Siebiesiuk 10 Reputation points

2024-05-27T23:54:44.75+00:00

I am not tech-savvy and I do not understand what you are trying to explain. I have the same issue, before update, I could use read-aloud on any pdf. I have pdfs saved in my computer I open it thorough edge and I should be able to have this function working as it was week ago. Now is not reading not doing nothing. I have no idea how to keep computer connected to those stuff you are saying. Some people here want easy step by step explanation how to fix it. I am not interested to do IT course I am interested in easy fixing it.

Answer 2

Mahsa Ghaffari Targhi 0

It does not work for me yet.
Also, there was no module as "Speech Recognition". However, I updated EVERYTHING there and still the read aloud does not work.

Radhakrishna MV 66 Reputation points

2025-11-24T13:30:13.2766667+00:00

Was it working earlier? If yes, check if any new browser extensions (especially ad blockers, privacy managers like Privacy Badger, or other accessibility tools) are interfering with the way Edge renders pages or launches internal features, making the Read aloud option vanish or fail.

Also check the following -

Is your browser fully updated? What is the version?

Is your computer managed by an organization (school or corporate environment)? The system administrator may have used Group Policy to explicitly disable speech-related features, including SpeechRecognitionEnabled (or similar policies), which affects the browser's ability to use these services.

Answer 3

Ana Carol Branco 0

I've been struggling with this issue for months. This is the only solution that has effectively worked:

Open the PDF in Edge.
Select all the text (Ctrl+A) and copy it (Ctrl+C).
Open a new tab and paste (Ctrl+V) the text into an online editor, such as https://onlinenotepad.org/notepad.
Use the "Read Aloud" feature in this new tab on the web page, since it usually works on regular web page text.

Share via

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

3 answers

Your answer