Speechify on X

Users describe loading a PDF, a Google Doc or a textbook and having it read aloud while they walk on a walking pad, work or do chores, and one says they follow the text with their eyes while it reads. A parent says it reads photographed pages aloud to a son in high school who reads at junior-high level. One recommends it for research, text to speech and speech to text, and calls the week's trial worth it; another plans exam revision by having PDFs summarised and pushing the summary into Speechify. What people praise most concretely is voice choice: Snoop Dogg and John Rhys-Davies are both named, and one writer uses John Rhys-Davies as the preferred voice for their own fiction.

The 6 people in the rave theme go further. One says it "changed my life" as a writer to hear their own work read back, another bought it and now finds long-form reading hard without it, and one is delighted at a voice reading firefighting standards through a dry book.

The price posts give figures: $129 a year, a subscription someone who lost their job decided to replace with a free version they built themselves, and almost R$ 400 for premium from a user who calls it the best and still cannot justify paying it. A developer is preparing free versions of Speechify and an Android reader, noting at least $10 a month is normally needed to pay for such apps. Another post names the yearly cost without complaint, and one user simply decides it is time to pay.

On text, one user says Greek words have to be spelled out while Hebrew is pronounced perfectly, and another found technical and chemical books, especially ones with equations and depth, not covered well enough, naming YouLearn as no better. A developer spent four hours tracking down why dictation was inserted incorrectly on macOS, saying the app does not use the standard way text input is inserted.

Both free-setup posts start from the price. One paid $129 a year, lost their job, decided text to speech is easy to build and made a free version; the other says at least $10 a month is normally needed for this kind of app and is preparing free versions of Speechify and an Android speed reader.

The remaining three are single names. A former subscriber says they paid $20 a month a few years ago until ChatGPT came out, with no further explanation. One post is a bare pairing of Speechify and Imogen with nothing around it. The third announces cancelling both Readwise Reader and Speechify subscriptions now that Slurp has shipped for Mac, iPhone, Safari and Chrome.

So the comparison set is small reading apps and people's own builds. Nobody here describes trying one of these and going back to Speechify.

The plan is to scan a book a chapter at a time on a phone, run the chapter through a translation app — Google Translate or DeepL, the latter noted for its reputation on German — then upload the translated text to Speechify and listen to it while trying to follow along in the original German. The post sets this out as an intention, so it does not say whether the upload worked or how the two versions lined up.

That is the whole of what people ask for here: no second post requests a feature, so there is no way to say whether others want the same thing or something different.