Listen to a long report on the go with Speechify

A long report or a new law often waits weeks for a free afternoon. Listening turns commute time into reading time. Speechify reads PDFs, articles and photos of pages aloud in a natural voice, at the speed you choose, and highlights the text as it goes. A long document takes about 20 minutes of your attention beyond the listening itself. The trick is to listen for understanding and go back to the text for anything you will act on.

Choose the right document

Pick a document without confidential or personal data: an industry report, a published law, a market analysis. Documents you listen to are uploaded to the service's servers, so contracts and HR documents with personal data stay out. The best candidates are long, narrative documents you need to understand broadly. Dense tables do not survive being read aloud.

Prepare it for the ear

For documents full of abbreviations, figures and footnotes, a quick rewrite for listening helps a lot. Paste the text into a chat assistant with this prompt:

Role: you are an editor preparing a document for text-to-speech. Context: document: {{document type}}. Listener: {{role}}. Task: rewrite the document for listening: expand abbreviations, write numbers as words where a voice would read them unclearly, remove footnotes and tables and replace them with a short description. Keep the meaning unchanged. Format: text for narration with subheadings. No long dashes. Document: {{text}}

Keep the original next to it. The rewritten version is for listening; the original is for checking.

An alternative for some documents is an audio overview in NotebookLM, a two-host conversation about the document. It is engaging and it retells the document in its own words, which can distort a rule or a condition. For laws and policies, a straight reading is safer.

Set the speed and listen

Set the speed at which you still follow the text, usually 1.3 to 1.6. You will find your own range: faster for familiar topics, slower for legal language. While listening, mark the moments you need to come back to. In the phone app, a quick bookmark or a note with the time works; the point is to not stop and reread on the spot.

Check in the text

After listening, open the document and go to the marked passages. Read them properly. Check every number you plan to use: the voice reads numbers and abbreviations oddly, and a decimal can sound like a whole number at speed. For reports with many figures, listen along with the text on screen for the sections with numbers.

Write down three takeaways

Finish by writing the three main takeaways, in your own words. If you cannot name three, the document either did not matter or needs a proper read.

What to do

1. Choose a document without confidential or personal data.
2. For dense documents, prepare a version for listening with the prompt above.
3. Upload it to Speechify and set a speed between 1.3 and 1.6.
4. Listen and mark the moments you need to come back to.
5. Open the document and check the marked passages and numbers.
6. Write down the three main takeaways.

Done

The document is listened to, marked passages are checked in the text, and three takeaways are written down.

Pricing

The free version has basic voices and standard speed, without premium voices or scanning of large volumes. Premium costs 139 USD per year, which works out to 11.58 USD per month, with premium voices, high speed, page scanning and AI summaries. The trial converts to annual billing automatically, so cancel before it ends if the service does not suit you. See Speechify pricing, Speechify alternatives and Speechify vs ElevenLabs.