readability-read-aloud-web-pdf-ai-summary

The extension installs as a Manifest V3 browser extension, no account or server required. When you open a cluttered article or PDF, it extracts the readable content, renders it in a clean view, and optionally runs an on-device summarization pass. Text-to-speech plays back with sentence-by-sentence highlighting so you can follow along without losing your place — a meaningful difference from tab-switching to a separate reader or copy-pasting into a TTS tool. Processed documents land in a local library with semantic search powered by on-device embeddings.

The defining architectural choice is full locality. Every step — extraction, embedding, summarization, TTS — runs inside the browser with bundled models. The source includes a dedicated embedding worker, a TTS worker, and a YOLO-based layout model for PDFs, according to the repository file structure. For researchers handling sensitive documents, that means no terms-of-service review of what a cloud vendor does with your text. It also means the tool works offline once installed.

This fits a solo researcher or privacy-focused individual who reads heavily on the web and wants one place to capture, listen to, and search that reading — all without touching a server. It does not fit teams: there is no sharing layer, no sync across machines, and no collaboration on annotations. The on-device summarization model, while functional, produces shorter and less nuanced summaries than hosted alternatives — teams with a high quality bar for summarization will hit that ceiling quickly and move to a pipeline that calls an external LLM. The tool is free and open-source with no paid tier gating any feature.

PDF handling uses PDF.js under the hood alongside the YOLO layout model, which means mathematical content gets a render pass through KaTeX and tables get OCR treatment, according to the repository’s file listing. YouTube transcripts are also supported via a dedicated module. Export produces paginated PDFs, so content captured for later reference can leave the library in a portable format.