Research Papers, Read Aloud
Listen to Research Papers on the Move.
Your reading list grows faster than your desk time. Speek reads academic papers and research PDFs aloud, cleaned up for the ear, so you can get through them on the walk to the lab or the drive home.
The Short Answer
To listen to a research paper, send the PDF to Speek and choose Read All. Speek skips running headers, page numbers and inline citations, announces section headings and reads tables as sentences, so a paper sounds like a reading rather than a scrape. It reads text PDFs in English; a scan with no text layer may not read well yet.
Papers Are Hard to Listen To. Here Is Why.
A research PDF is laid out for print: two columns, running headers, page numbers, footnotes and an author year citation in every other sentence. Ordinary text to speech reads all of it, in whatever order the PDF stores it, and the argument gets lost.
Speek prepares the paper for listening first. The clutter is skipped, citations are moved out of the sentence, tables become sentences and figures are described, so what you hear is the paper's argument in order.
What You Hear
Results Tables, Spoken Like a Person Would.
On the Page
Table 2. Accuracy by condition (n = 412). Control 61.2 (SD 8.4); Treatment A 68.9 (SD 7.9); Treatment B 70.3 (SD 8.1). p < .001 (Smith et al., 2021).
What Speek Says
“Table two compares accuracy across 412 participants. The control group scored 61.2. Treatment A reached 68.9, and Treatment B was highest at 70.3. The difference was statistically significant.”
How to Do It
From Your Screen to Your Headphones.
Send the PDF
Share the paper to Speek from Files, Mail or your browser on iPhone, or select it in Finder and press Control Option S on Mac. A link to the paper works too.
Pick How Much to Hear
TLDR to decide whether it is worth your time. Focused for the method and findings without the boilerplate. Read All when you need every section.
Listen and Come Back
Hear it on the move, then open the script to find the section you want to read closely at your desk.
Triage Your Reading List
Hear the TLDR of five papers on one walk, then give Read All to the one that matters.
Know Where You Are
Section headings are announced, so you always know whether you are in the methods, the results or the discussion.
Built for Long Sessions
19 voices chosen for hour long listening, every one on every plan, from 0.75× to 2×, with your place kept between sessions.
Common Questions.
What is the best text to speech for research papers?
Pick a reader that skips headers, page numbers and citations and handles tables, because those are what make papers painful to hear. Speek does all four. Listening.com is built for academics and connects to Zotero; free readers such as Edge Read Aloud work but read every page artifact. Our guide compares them: getspeek.com/best-apps-to-listen-to-pdfs.
Does it read equations?
Speek describes simple formulas in words. Dense mathematics is better read on the page, and the script shows you where it sits.
Does it read the reference list?
The reference list is left out of the reading, because nobody wants to hear forty citations in a row. It stays in your PDF.
Can it read scanned papers?
Speek reads the text layer in a PDF. Older scans without one may not read well yet, and Speek will tell you rather than play something wrong.
Take That Paper for a Walk.
One app for iPhone and Mac, with every voice on every plan. Join the waitlist and we will email you when your account is ready, with about 20 minutes of listening free to start.