Turn your notes and readings into study audio
Reading is not the only way to get through a set text. Drop a lecture PDF, a Word handout or your own revision notes in here and you get back an MP3 you can listen to on the bus, at the gym, or on a third pass through material you have already read twice.
It is free - one quick sign-in, no credit card - and your documents are read inside your own browser rather than uploaded to anyone.
- No credit card
- 322 voices
- Files never uploaded
Edit the line to hear anything you like.
Four things students actually use this for
- Second-pass revision. You have read the chapter once. Listening to it again while walking catches what skim-reading missed, and costs you no desk time.
- Proofreading your own work. A voice reads exactly what you wrote, not what you meant. Missing words, doubled words and sentences that run away from you are obvious out loud and invisible on screen.
- Reading lists you will not otherwise finish. A 30-page paper you have been avoiding is 25 minutes of listening.
- Pronunciation of unfamiliar terms. Useful in medicine, law, and any subject with a vocabulary you have only ever read silently.
Settings worth changing
The defaults are tuned for a first listen. For study audio, three changes are usually worth making:
| Setting | Why change it |
|---|---|
| Speed +25% | Familiar material at natural pace feels slow. Push it until it is brisk but not effortful; you can always slow the player down for a hard passage. |
| Pauses between sections | Insert a pause where a new heading starts. It gives you a moment to register that the topic changed, which matters a lot when you cannot see the page. |
| Pronunciation fixes | Add a respelling for terms the voice gets wrong - a drug name, a theorist, an acronym. It changes only what is spoken; your text and subtitles keep the original spelling. |
Getting a PDF to read cleanly
Lecture PDFs are the messiest input, because a slide deck stores text as positioned fragments rather than sentences. Headers, slide numbers and figure captions can land in the middle of a paragraph.
Everything lands in the editor as plain text before anything is spoken, so the fix is quick: delete the furniture, then generate. If your PDF is a photocopy or a photographed page, there is no text to extract at all - a scan is a picture, and that will not work here yet.
Questions
- How much can I convert at once?
- 7,000 characters per allowance - roughly 1,200 words, or about seven minutes of speech. That is a dense lecture handout or a full section of a chapter. The allowance refills two minutes after you use it up, so working through a long chapter in sittings is normal use rather than a workaround.
- Will my lecture notes be uploaded anywhere?
- The PDF or Word file is opened and read inside your browser, so the file itself never leaves your laptop. Only the text you actually send to be spoken is transmitted. Nothing is stored afterwards.
- Can I speed it up like a podcast app?
- Yes, in two places. The Speed control before generating bakes the pace into the file, from half speed to double. The player also has its own speed toggle, so you can slow a hard paragraph down without regenerating anything.
- Does it work for maths and science notation?
- Partly. Ordinary technical prose reads well, but equations, superscripts and symbols were written to be seen rather than said, and a voice will make a mess of them. Convert the prose and read the derivations on the page.
- Can I use this for a group project or presentation?
- For a narration track you record for a class presentation, yes.
- Is it actually free, or is there a trial?
- Free, with no credit card and no trial period - you sign in (with Google or an email address) to generate audio, and that is all. The limit is the character allowance per window, not a countdown to a paywall.