Text-to-Speech (TTS) makes reading "easy"

​PDFSpeech provides an autopilot mode to help you read anything. It adds momentum to the static page, and engages both your eyes & ears to advance you gently through the content, at a steady pace. You can start anywhere in the document, and stop at any time. PDFSpeech makes it easy to speed up to browse documents, and easy to slow down to study. You control the speed, and you can simply have it read again whatever requires a second attempt for better understanding.

I’ve personally had a lot of success with text-to-speech (TTS), even for reading dense textbooks! Recently, I read the book “Data Science for Business” of around 400 pages, on the Safari Books Online library. At that time, PDFSpeech didn’t exist, and I had to incrementally select text on the web page, then hit a keyboard shortcut for the “speak selected text” command built into macOS. The tedium was reduced a lot by using PopClip, which allowed me to select text with the mouse, and then immediately click the “say” command in a convenient popover placed right under the mouse. I was genuinely surprised by the ease with which I was able to “read” a textbook for long stretches of time, marching steadily through the book. The fact that text-to-speech technology significantly cut the effort & willpower required to read a textbook from cover to cover is absolutely amazing. That’s where the idea of PDFSpeech was born - with the objective of reducing even further the friction involved in reading a book using TTS technology.