Microsoft Read Aloud for New Outlook

Immerse Reading was originally develop for children with read difficulties and is great for this, however compared the Read Aloud the user experience is much poorer and quite honestly an insult to intelligent adults. Immerse Reading use a separate app, is slow and a lot less accessible.

This for me is a significant step back by Microsoft in supporting accessibility and Neurodiversity, something they have been really strong on in the last few years.
I read somewhere they planning to bring it back to Outlook but still no sign of it as of May 2025.

While I like the window dressing of the new outlook, that is a good as it gets. It is disappointing to find key features such as Read Aloud have been removed or are missing entirely. I am baffled as to why features available in the previous version hasn’t carried over. I would have expected a baseline checklist of popular and widely used features to be used as a benchmark before releasing a new version. Removing core tools that many users rely on daily makes the updated product feel like it wasn’t ready for prime time. Did the quality control for this software get outsourced to Boeing?

This isn’t an isolated issue. Read Aloud is just one of several missing features I’ve encountered so far. Can you provide insight into why these omissions occurred, whether they’re being addressed, and when we can expect these features to return?

Consistency and reliability are critical in professional software, and many users depend on tools like Read Aloud to perform their jobs efficiently. I hope Microsoft will take this feedback seriously and prioritize restoring full feature parity.

Thank you!

Agree with the feedback here about it not working on drafts. That's must have functionality.

You’re absolutely right JosephPucci. Since MS got a boost from launching Copilot, MS is behaving arrongantly, like Apple has been doing “my way or the highway”. The death of Cortana, the ability to listen to my 200+FYI emails during my 2hr commute, was as painful as not being able to read aloud my drafts. Empires don’t last forever, probably XMail will see the gap and take over. Btw where’s Apple in AI (other than shamelessly conning AI “Apple Intelligence”? 😂

It's been over a year, with continuous complaints, and nothing has been done. It's appears there are no plans to update the features or the development for this app. It appears, MS is doing exactly what Apple has done, "If you want to use our products, you'll do it our way, if you don't like it, too bad."

I would go back to the web-based app, but they screwed that one up too because I can't add my other email accounts because they are not Hotmail or Outlook. Nice work people, nice work! :(

Hello Company USer_OutlookOneWon,

Good day!

Thank you for posting to Microsoft Community. We are glad to assist.

We are looking into your situation and we need sometime to do further tests on this. Will update the thread shortly.

Appreciate your patience and understanding and thank you for your time and cooperation.

Sincerely,

Microsoft Community