Text to speech, pay as you listen
Listen to anything.
Pay only for what you hear.
Articles, PDFs, books and notes read in natural voices with every word highlighted as it is spoken. No subscription: buy minutes, use them whenever you like.
- Try a full minute free, no account needed
- Then from $0.10 a minute, minutes never expire
- Works with the screen off, on any phone or laptop
PDF, EPUB, DOCX, Markdown, HTML, CSV & plain text · Up to 40 MB
Built for people who listen sometimes, not all day
Most text to speech apps want a yearly plan. If you listen to two long articles a week, that is paying for a gym you visit twice a month. ReadLoud meters listening time instead, and it is careful with it: audio is only generated when you press play, only as far ahead as you are listening, and cached so anything you replay is free.
Word-perfect highlighting
Word timings are recovered from the actual audio by forced alignment, then checked against a speech recogniser. The highlight sits on the word for a whole book, not just the first paragraph.
Starts in two seconds
The first sentence plays about two seconds after you press play, even on a 400-page document. The rest is synthesised ahead of you as you listen.
Voices from the newest models
Thirty voices across Gemini 2.5 Flash, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 3.1 and Chirp 3 HD. Newsreader, narrator, storyteller and calm delivery styles, or write your own.
Clean imports
Links are extracted like a reader view. PDFs lose their headers, footers and citation brackets. Skipped text is dimmed on the page so nothing disappears silently.
Made for phones
One continuous stream that keeps playing when the screen locks. Lock-screen controls, sleep timer with fade-out, exact speeds up to 4x.
Your library, your place
Every document remembers the sentence you stopped at, on every device. Download finished audio as a single MP3.
How it works
- Step 1
Paste, link or upload
Text from anywhere, a web address, or a PDF, EPUB, DOCX, HTML or Markdown file. ReadLoud extracts the readable part and shows it on the page.
- Step 2
Press play
Pick a voice and a delivery style, or keep the defaults. Audio starts in seconds and the words light up as they are read. Click any word to jump there.
- Step 3
Pay for the minutes you used
Your balance goes down by the length of audio generated. Pause, and generation pauses. Replay, and it is free. Add minutes when you need more.
Read the full explanation of how ReadLoud keeps the highlight in sync
Simple pricing: minutes, not months
A minute of credit is a minute of generated audio, in any voice. Speechify Premium costs about $139 a year; the same money buys over 23 hours on ReadLoud, and unlike a subscription the hours wait for you.
An hour of listening. A few long articles, or one short book chapter.
Five hours. A month of articles for an occasional listener.
Over sixteen hours. A whole book, or a season of long reads.
What people listen to
- Text to speech for students
Turn course readings, lecture notes and PDF textbooks into audio with synced highlighting. Pay per minute, not per semester.
- Listen to research papers
Turn arXiv preprints, journal PDFs and long reports into audio that skips citations and figure noise. Word-level highlighting keeps you in the text.
- Listen to newsletters and articles
Paste a link and hear the article in a natural voice, ad-free and clutter-free. A better read-later queue for people who walk, cook and commute.
- PDF and EPUB to audiobook
Upload a book or a report and listen with word highlighting, chapter-aware seeking and a downloadable MP3. Pay per minute of audio, not per book.
- Reading support for dyslexia and low vision
A reader built for following along: synced highlighting, OpenDyslexic font, focus mode, adjustable spacing and speed. Free trial, no account needed.
Common questions
- Is ReadLoud free?
- The first minute is free with no account. A free account adds 20 minutes. After that you buy minutes in packs from $9 and they never expire. There is no subscription.
- What does a minute cost?
- Between $0.10 and $0.15 depending on the pack. One minute of credit is one minute of freshly generated audio at 1x, in any voice. Replaying audio you already generated is free, and listening at 2x uses no more credit than the audio's real length.
- How is this different from Speechify?
- Speechify sells an annual subscription, so it is a great deal if you listen every day and an expensive one if you listen a few times a month. ReadLoud charges for minutes only. The voices are Google's newest Gemini and Chirp 3 HD models, and the word highlighting is measured against the actual audio rather than estimated.
- What can I listen to?
- Pasted text, any public web link, and PDF, EPUB, DOCX, HTML, Markdown and plain text files up to 40 MB.
- Does it work on my phone?
- Yes. ReadLoud is a web app that installs to your home screen on iPhone and Android, keeps playing with the screen locked, and shows controls on the lock screen.
- Which languages are supported?
- The Narrator engine reads more than fifty languages and locales. The Gemini engines are strongest in English and handle most European languages well. The language is detected from the document.