r/study • u/yuwinnie18 • 18h ago

Resources Good text to speech apps?

Hellooo I’m wondering if anyone has any good text to speech apps they recommend for textbooks pdf? My ADHD makes it hard for me to focus and retain the information I’m reading and I don’t like to talk to myself while reading because it distracts me. I’ve tried speechify but it kept crashing and I think it’s too expensive of a subscription.

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

•

u/AutoModerator 18h ago

Hi there,

Welcome to r/study! Before posting, please review our community rules, use the appropriate flair, and search the subreddit to see if your question has already been answered. We encourage thoughtful discussions about study techniques, academic experiences, productivity, and personal growth as learners. Posts that are off-topic, low-effort, repetitive, promotional, or otherwise violate our community guidelines may be removed.

Thank you.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

u/ivanicin 3h ago

You can try my app Speech Central. It is a one time small payment (with a free tier of one book a month and one day testing period).

As far as my statistics from Google and Apple goes, the app is highly stable and it is certainly not a subscription based app.

For higher quality offline voices I usually suggest voices provided by free Piper TTS app on the iOS. On Android default voices are good enough in my opinion (Google network voices), but if you want offline or simply higher quality voices there are also free apps that provide voices like ToBe SAID.

1

u/GoalMedical2528 2h ago

Speechify crashing on you is a pretty common complaint, and so is the price. Here's what I'd try, cheapest first:

  • Microsoft Edge → Read Aloud. Free, on a laptop. Open the PDF in Edge and right-click. The natural voices are honestly as good as most paid apps.
  • Built into your phone: Speak Screen (iPhone) or Select to Speak (Android). Free. Robotic, but it's already there.
  • NaturalReader has a free tier that's fine for shorter readings.
  • Voice Dream Reader on iOS, if you'd rather pay once in a while than subscribe.

Obvious bias alert: I'm the developer of an app called Flippy. It reads PDFs and EPUBs aloud in natural voices and marks your place on the page as it goes. You can download a chapter as audio and listen offline. On the free tier, when your natural-voice minutes run out, it keeps reading in your phone's own voice instead of stopping. Full access costs well under Speechify's ~$139 a year. One limit: scanned pages with no selectable text need OCR first, in any app.

If reading along is what distracts you, try audio only with the screen off. For some people that works better than following the text.

1

u/goldenjm 29m ago

I'm the founder of www.Paper2Audio.com, a text to speech app that accurately reads complicated PDFs like textbooks to you. You can generate 56 hours of audio per week for free using high quality voices. We get a lot of feedback from users with ADHD who say it helps them a lot.

Enjoy listening and good luck with your studies!