How to Listen to Outlook Emails
• By Elliott Tong
To listen to Outlook emails, install a text-to-speech Chrome extension like Alexandria, then open any email in your Outlook inbox. A play button appears in the email view—click it to start listening. Alexandria works across outlook.live.com, outlook.office.com, and outlook.office365.com (Microsoft 365), reading the email aloud while highlighting each word in real-time.
Why Listen to Your Outlook Emails Instead of Reading Them?
Outlook is the most-used business email platform worldwide [Statista, 2024]. The average office worker receives around 121 emails per day [cloudHQ Workplace Email Statistics, 2025], and most professionals are reading them on Outlook—either personal Outlook on outlook.live.com or work email on outlook.office.com. By late afternoon, the inbox feels heavier than your eyes.
Listening to emails solves this in a few ways:
Key Facts
- Office workers receive an average of 121 emails per day and spend around 15.5 hours per week managing email [cloudHQ, 2025].
- Outlook has the largest enterprise email market share in 2024, used by the majority of Fortune 500 companies [Statista, 2024].
- Research from Allwork.Space (2026) reports desk workers spending the equivalent of more than half the year on screens [Allwork.Space, 2026].
- 71% of desk workers say eye strain is hurting their productivity [Allwork.Space, 2026].
- Microsoft's native Read Aloud in Outlook lacks word-by-word visual highlighting and resets to default settings on every email [Microsoft Support documentation, 2024].
- Dual coding (hearing words while seeing them highlighted) improves comprehension and memory retention compared to reading alone [Paivio, University of Western Ontario; Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes].
You can multitask
Listen while organising files, processing routine work, or handling other tasks. Long FYI emails and team updates that would sit unread in your inbox actually get consumed.
It reduces eye strain
Outlook users typically have multiple windows open—email, calendar, Teams chat, browser tabs—competing for visual attention. Switching to listening removes one source of strain. Research from Allwork.Space (2026) reports that 71% of desk workers say eye strain hurts their productivity.
It helps you actually finish long messages
The longer an email, the lower the chance you read all of it. Newsletters, project updates, board reports, compliance memos—listening forces you through the whole thing rather than skimming the first paragraph and moving on.
It improves focus and retention
When you hear words while seeing them highlighted, you engage both auditory and visual processing simultaneously. This is called dual coding, a theory developed by Allan Paivio at the University of Western Ontario. Research shows that pairing verbal and visual information creates stronger memory encoding than either channel alone [Paivio, 1971; Lindamood-Bell, 2024]. For work email specifically, that means better recall of action items, decisions, and deadlines—the parts that come back to bite you in the next meeting.
Tips for Listening to Outlook Effectively
Start with newsletters and FYI threads
Don't start with an email you need to respond to immediately. Begin with newsletters, internal updates, or threads where you just need to absorb the content. This lets you get comfortable with the listening experience before using it for emails that need a careful written reply.
Match the email type to the method
Text-to-speech works best for: newsletters and digests, long updates from colleagues, project status emails, FYI threads, board reports and compliance memos, multi-message threads you need to catch up on. It is less ideal for: emails with embedded tables of numbers, code snippets, technical diagrams, or emails where you need to click through multiple links to act.
Build up your speed gradually
Most people can eventually listen at 1.5x to 3x speed, but it takes time. Your brain needs to learn to process speech at that rate. Start at 1x or 1.25x for the first week, then gradually increase. At 1.5x speed, a 5-minute email takes just over 3 minutes. At 2x, it takes 2.5 minutes. The time savings compound across dozens of emails per day. For a full breakdown of Alexandria vs other options, see our comparison at /compare/alexandria-vs-speechify.
Combine with Outlook's keyboard shortcuts
Outlook web supports keyboard shortcuts (turn them on in Settings → General → Accessibility → Keyboard shortcut version). The default Outlook shortcuts let you navigate inbox quickly: J/K to move between emails, R to reply, E to archive. Combine these with Alexandria's shortcuts (Ctrl+Space to play/pause, Ctrl+Right Arrow to skip forward) and you can process the inbox systematically without touching the mouse.
Use it when your eyes are tired
The best time for email TTS is often late afternoon, when you've been staring at screens since morning standup. Listening lets you stay productive without adding more eye strain. For a wider look at TTS options for Chrome, see our guide at /best/text-to-speech-chrome-extension.