Listening: Text to Speech

I am a PhD student who just tried multiple similar apps for the first time and I feel like “Listening” is the best for my purpose and would significantly improve my workflow. Unlike Speechify, Listening allows me to bookmark sentences with one click for future references while listening. This is essential cause I listen to articles while working out and cooking to save time — It is inconvenient if I have to pause audio and take highlights/notes using separate apps, or if I have to sit down later and go back through the article to re-find what sounded useful for me. Also, Listening takes time to render pdfs in the beginning, which actually leads to cleaner audio outputs that don’t include random marginal watermarks from journals that repeat after every page with Speechify. For the Listening team tho: I wanted to compare reddit reviews of various apps that do similar things and it was hard to locate posts about “Listening” because your name is really generic. I ended up just trying multiple apps and I do like this one. Hope you stay in business cause the subscription is yearly lol

I am a grad student and really, really wanted this to work. I held on to the subscription for a few months longer than I should have because I hoped for some serious improvements, but those never came. I cannot recommend this app and have instead taken to telling fellow academics to avoid it. Text readers and academic articles never mix well and unfortunately this app is no different. It is nice in concept - a reader app specifically oriented around academic articles that organizes by header sections and does not read the citations or header/footer information. I loved the idea of the text being available in the app to follow along with. However, in practice this app is a mess. The headers often do not correspond to the headers in the article (often many extra headers with no information below them, or headers that are just parts of a sentence). The text does not match the articles chronologically- often accidentally creating new and weird sentences or rearranging the text by reading across two columns or skipping sections. This is a huge issue because at times the authors’ intentions would be contradicted or made confusing by the app’s improper reading of the material. If the listener is not aware of this issue, they may end up mistaking the article entirely.

The AI voices are impressive in their ability to read fairly naturally with pauses, emphasis, and tone. However, I have found that when it scans in text, it sometimes will skip a line, especially at page breaks. It also sometimes splits up a sentence as if there was a paragraph break, causing a pause in the AI voice that can impede comprehension. In one case, the font of the PDF was readable but something caused it to frequently interpret a “y” at the end of a word as separate from the rest of the word. Finally, when uploading a large PDF it has to load the text in chunks for reading, and when loading the next chunk it consistently was skipping about a paragraph so I had to manually move it back to the top of the skipped text (on the other hand, it was 200 pages and I’m impressed it could handle that at all!). If the text scanning is improved this could be 5 stars.