I’ve recently stumbled into quite an annoying problem in desktop versions of Word 2019 and Outlook 2019 regarding the Read Aloud functionality, which I needed to turn off. As you may already know, Read Aloud is a neat text-to-speech feature that, as the name implies, is designed to read the text from your Word documents files or Outlook emails aloud. So, what’s the problem here? Well, first of all, I don’t use it. However, it often happens that the program starts reading my text even though I don’t want it to. This happens because I accidentally turn this functionality on with the Alt+Ctrl+Space keyboard shortcut (e.g. if I miss the Ctrl+X or Ctrl+C shortcut).

In this article, I would like to share my solution on how to disable Read Aloud in Outlook and how to remove the shortcut key in Word that turns this feature on.