About Document Reader — listen to PDFs and documents
Listening to a document instead of reading it is useful in more situations than it first appears: proofreading your own writing, getting through a long report while commuting, resting your eyes, or simply preferring to take information in by ear.
This reader extracts the text from a PDF, Word document or plain text file and reads it aloud with a voice you choose. You can play it in the browser or download the audio to listen to later, offline.
How to use it
- Upload a PDF, DOCX or TXT file, or paste a link to one.
- Pick a voice and set the reading speed — around 150 words per minute is natural; faster suits material you already know.
- For a long PDF, set a page range so you only hear the part you need.
- Play it in the browser, or download the audio file to listen offline.
Frequently asked questions
- Which file types can it read?
- PDF, Word documents (.docx) and plain text files (.txt). Text files are read whatever encoding they were saved in, so a document written on Windows in UTF-16 works as well as a modern UTF-8 one.
- Why does my scanned PDF produce nothing?
- A scanned page is a photograph of text, not text itself, so there is nothing to read out. Run the PDF through the OCR feature in the PDF Editor first — that adds a real text layer — and then it can be read aloud.
- Can I listen to just part of a long document?
- Yes. For PDFs you can set a start and end page, which is worth doing for anything book-length: synthesising several hundred pages takes a while and produces a very large audio file.
- What happens to my document?
- It is uploaded so the text can be extracted and the speech generated, then deleted from the server afterwards. Nothing is kept, indexed or shared. If you would rather nothing left your machine at all, the desktop version does the same work entirely offline.