Listening: Text to Speech

Samantha Hendrickson

7 months ago

Reads through journal articles better than any other app, does a great job of removing citations, headers/ footers, and tables. The voices are not perfect but it generally pronounces medical terminology well. I wish I could create a list of acronyms (that come up in my discipline frequently) that it automatically convert to the full name so that its not trying to pronounce them.

Dorotea Macri

9 months ago

I find it really disingenuous to not make it clear before downloading and signing up that the ONLY way to use this app is paid (and paying a lot- $140 for a year up front, or $240 if you pay monthly. There are lots of free apps that do basically the same thing. the whole world is tired of subscriptions. if you gave a month or so trial and then asked me to pay like $50 flat rate I would probably consider it, but as is absolutely not

Peter Schumann

1 year ago

I've never reviewed an app before, but I thought this one was so bad it was worth saying something. The URL function doesn't work at all. The article sections are not detected. Titles not read. All of the in-text citations are read. The voice is basically Microsoft Sam with no natural sounding flow. Laziest app development ever!

Erin Bailey

5 months ago

I downloaded this app for a free trial. I realized this was not the app for me and canceled my free trial. I even received a cancel confirmation email. 14 days later, I was charged $99 by the app service. I contacted customer service, letting them know, as well as a screenshot of the cancelation confirmation email. I was told I would receive a full refund in 5 to 7 business days. I have yet to receive the refund and have now opened a charge dispute with my bank. Total rip-off.

K W

1 year ago

This is a great concept but the execution and user experience have much room for improvement. I can elaborate more as I familiarize myself with the app. At the very least there should be a way to rename and organize titles once they are uploaded to the cloud library. Even adding folders for different courses would be very helpful. Forcing PC use to upload PDFs is a bit ridiculous since phones have the ability to manage files. Especially considering that on the go nature of this app.

a b

8 months ago

great app. definitely the top reader app out there that i've tried, much more realistic than other options (but still a ways to go). i haven't tried longer texts, so can't speak to others' complaints about titles etc getting messed up by uploads. i wish there was an option to turn off the follow-along highlight because it doesn't really line up with the speech and it's very distracting. If the AI voice was just be a smidge more realistic, it would be fantastic.

Rebecca Joyce

10 months ago

This app destroys the formatting of the document. A paper with subheadings and sections becomes one loooong run-on paragraph. It also can't skip or separate citations, either. It basically turns a document into a long string of words. It also doesn't seem to pick up where I leave off. I'd love to have audio version of my text books and articles so I can hear them on my long commute, but this app has a long way to go.

Bell Jelly

1 year ago

Love using it to read papers and journal articles. The text is often too dense for me and my eyes skip words, making it difficult to understand what I just read. With the app, I can slow down the speed of speech and listen while my visual brain generates images (much easier for me to do than with reading). I would suggest perhaps removing the reference numbers, it is distracting while listening. Otherwise, I like where this is going! Thank you!

Tamar A

11 months ago

It works well but has some problems. The Ai does a good job of pronouncing every word and the voice sounds natural. But when PDFs download its doesn't notice the sections and will often break up words and sentences so the the Ai speaks that broken word weirdly. Sometimes the app will think figure legends or footnotes are part of the paper and read it. The Ai reading is much better than other text to speech apps I've used.

nan wu

1 year ago

I was super excited about the concept and wanted to try it. I uploaded a pretty standard PDF in life science field, 12 page of text and 10 pages of reference list. The app says "the pdf you uploaded is too long to read in the podcast format, please open it in listening.io app". Doesn't make sense - I wad trying to open in in the app. Not sure where the "podcast format" came from. Not mentioned in the tutorial either. Quite disappointing. Not sure if I should cancel or wait and see if they update

Preston Carter

11 months ago

I will definitely stop paying for this app if they don't fix it soon. When you pause the audiobook, it just restarts and keeps playing even if you unplug the headphones. Even shutting the app down might not stop it from playing. Also, It doesn't read the sections of PDFs and usually just makes up random titles, so the section feature doesn't work. Downloads and wait times are long.

Damon Berry

7 months ago

Good idea but barely usable. My files all contain awkward mid sentence pauses in every single sentence that disrupt the flow of what I am listening to. The voice change feature does not work at all. The app cannot be closed and restarted in any normal way - when it bugs out, which it does often, I have to force stop the app. Then it logs me out and won't let me log back in. So then I have to Uninstall the app. Total nightmare - will not pay for this in its current state.

Kristin Perkins

11 months ago

I paid for and tried this app but I'm going to need to switch to a better one. It can't handle big downloads. I wanted it to read a book to me and it would just not download the end of almost every section. My guess is almost a third of the book would just never load. It's big claim that it skips citations is not true. It regularly reads citations to me. The notes app sometimes glitches. It breaks up paragraphs and sentences and sometimes words. Will be trying Evie and Speechify next.

Autumn Averitt

9 months ago

Maybe it's a Samsung compatibility issue, but out of the 10+ times I've tried to upload a pdf, one time has worked. My best guess is that it needs to be directly uploaded from your phone rather than from a cloud drive. Also beware, you'll think you've unsubscribed based on the website, but you have to *also* go in to your Google Play account and unsubscribe there. If your target market is broke and stressed-out grad students, you should prioritize making unsubscribing easy.

Kimberly Nielsen

4 months ago

A few common and annoying issues: 1. Pronounces hyphenated words in PDF papers weirdly (e.g. "guid-ed" becomes "gooey-did"). 2. Still includes citations in voice recordings (e.g. "Russel et al., 2019" is spoken). 3. Occasionally adds spaces between letters of every word and pronounces the word as individual letters (e.g., "l e t t e r s"). 4. Will only let me upload PDFs, but not links to papers, even with institutional access.

Mollie Cohen Rosenthal D'Agostino

1 week ago

love the concept and the UI is decent, very minimalist and good looking. It really helps me get through dense academic and legal texts. A bit expensive, and could have a few more notes features for a premium option, like adding your own spoken notes to clips or summarizing content from clips.

Oliver Neria

1 week ago

It can get a little glitchy depending on the format of the article being imported, but in the end Listening has positively impacted the number of articles I'm able to read every day. Sometimes it mispronounces terminology but my research is in a pretty small field, and after submitting a couple reports I've seen improvement. Definitely give this app a try!