Speechify – Text to Speech

Speechify runs on its own SIMBA text to speech model, and the result is a set of voices that sound close to human speech rather than the flat robotic tone older readers are known for. The Premium tier opens up more than 1,000 voices across 60+ languages, and it also carries licensed celebrity voices like Snoop Dogg and Gwyneth Paltrow. That range matters when you learn a language, because hearing natural pronunciation in the target language beats reading it silently.

The speed control is the feature most regulars lean on. You can start around normal reading pace and nudge the rate up to about 5x, which is roughly 900 words per minute. For a student working through a stack of papers, that turns an evening of reading into a short listen. You adjust the language, the accent, and the pace to fit the material, so dense technical writing can play slower than a news roundup.

When the text isn't already digital, Speechify reads it from an image. Point the camera at a printed page, book, or sign, or drop in a screenshot, and the app extracts the words and reads them aloud. It works on letters, worksheets, and pages from a physical book you can't otherwise digitize. Clear print reads best, so shaky or handwritten text may come out uneven.

Beyond reading, Speechify writes for you. Voice typing lets you dictate email, documents, and messages by speaking, which the company frames as writing several times faster than typing. It reaches beyond the Speechify window, so you can use it in Google Docs and Gmail. For anyone whose bottleneck is typing rather than thinking, this flips the workflow around.

On Premium you can turn a document into an AI podcast, working as an AI podcast generator that turns a document into a spoken summary in styles like a deep dive or a lecture. The voice AI assistant goes further: you can ask it what an article is about, request a quiz on the material, or talk through a book you're reading. It reads the source you point it at, so the answers stay tied to your own document rather than the open web.

Your library syncs between web, iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows, so a document you start on a laptop is waiting on your phone. If you build software, Speechify also sells a separate developer API under SpeechifyAI, billed by characters rather than a flat subscription. Plans start free with 500K characters a month and scale up to high-volume tiers, with voice cloning on the paid levels.