Google Chrome may finally be getting a massive upgrade to reading mode

Reading mode is awesome, but it has gotten stagnant. Most of the best phones available right now have Google Chrome pre-installed and while it is awesome that the browser comes with a reading mode for text-heavy pages (like this one), it feels… Stagnant.

Not only that, but if you are on any of the Chrome beta channels, your experience becomes even weirder. Sometimes you can’t turn on reading mode and other times, it cuts off big chunks of the content that you’re there to read in the first place.

So, it is obvious that it is time for an upgrade. And given that Google seems to be running an experiment over on the Canary version of Chrome for desktop, we may actually know what we’re in for. And that’s a reading mode that can also read aloud (finally!). So, Chrome Canary. What is it? Well, it’s a developer-first version of Chrome. It’s plenty experimental, it changes often and if you’d like to join in on the fun: you can run it on your phone and computer. Oh, and its users get to test out features ahead of time.

Now, hold on to that last bit, because — as someone who uses Canary on the daily, just out of preference — not all changes stick. And it is a real bummer, because some of them are totally awesome, but oh well. You can’t win ‘em all!

Anyway: reading mode. The latest update on the desktop version of Canary, as you can see above, comes with a new secret treat: a reading mode that can actually read text aloud to you.

Right now, the voice that executes that role is being described as monotone and robotic, but this is Google we’re talking about. They have the power and prowess to improve that… As long as the feature sticks.

That being said, what are the chances of this actually making its way to the mobile version of Canary and then Chrome stable? Well, pretty big, as long as testing goes well. But, before that happens, let me raise you this:

Did you know that your Android phone can already do this? If not, then know that as long as you’ve got Google Assistant installed and running, you can prompt it — while on the article page in question, such as this one — and ask it to read it aloud for you. It works quite well.

So, while adding such a feature to phones may sound redundant, it also may serve as a sort of shortcut to prompting Assistant to do that. Plus, it may solve another issue: granting phones that aren’t really compatible with Google Assistant such a feature. Will that be the case?

We’ll see if the testing period goes well.