Text to speech PDF reader: read PDFs aloud or as MP3

You don't have to pay anything to hear a PDF on a computer: Edge and Preview come with the system, and Acrobat Reader is a free download. Word does it too, if you already have it. None of them saves the reading as a file. It plays while the document is open, and that's it.

No. iPhone and Android both have a feature that reads whatever is on screen, and an open PDF counts. Since they read the screen rather than the file, bump up the text size before you start and leave the phone alone while it plays.

For listening on the spot, any of the free ones will do. Look at the fourth column: only one option lets you keep the audio.

Try selecting a single word with your mouse. If the whole page highlights like a photo, it's a scan: images of pages with no text behind them. No text to speech PDF reader can read that, and Voizum will tell you it found no text. You need OCR first, and the simplest free route is Google Drive:

1. 1Upload the PDF to Google Drive on your computer.
2. 2Right-click the file and choose Open with > Google Docs.
3. 3Drive creates a new document with the recognized text; the original PDF stays as it was.
4. 4Check the text, then use File > Download > Microsoft Word (.docx), or copy the text to paste wherever you'll listen to it.

Copy a full page and paste it into Notepad or TextEdit. Whatever shows up there, in that order, is what you'll hear. The reader follows the order the text is stored in inside the PDF, which doesn't always match what you see on screen.

A full page of a book or study notes holds about 3,000 characters. That's an estimate: a page with wide margins or large type has far fewer. At that size, here's how long a PDF takes at normal speed and what converting it to MP3 costs:

As an MP3 it plays on your phone with the screen off, even offline. The steps:

1. 1Open the generator and click Upload a document. It accepts .txt, .md, .srt, .pdf, .docx, up to 15 MB. The text is extracted in your own browser; the PDF isn't uploaded to any server.
2. 2The PDF's text appears in the box. Skim it before generating: remove headers, page numbers and footnote markers as in the table above. If the file can't be read, copy the text from your PDF reader and paste it in.
3. 3Pick a voice and play its sample. For long listening, a calm narration voice works best. The language is detected automatically among the 7 available: English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Italian and Russian.
4. 4Set the speed, from 0.5× to 2×. Speed it up to review notes you already know; leave it at 1× for new material.
5. 5Click Generate. You see the credit cost before anything is spent.
6. 6Play it in the browser and download the MP3. It works the same on a phone.

A whole book crammed into one MP3 plays fine but is a pain to pick up again. For a long PDF, this works better:

• One file per chapter: copy each chapter separately. If you lose your place, you go back to the start of a chapter, not to a timestamp in a ten-hour file.
• Pauses between sections: type <#2#> wherever you want a 2-second pause, for example after a chapter title. Those markers aren't charged.
• The same voice throughout: note which voice and speed you picked so chapter 12 sounds like chapter 1.
• Lots of chapters at once: if you've ever bought credits, Chain audios generates up to 100 files in one go, each one separate, with about 20 hours of speech between them and a single minimum charge for the whole batch.
• What doesn't belong in an audiobook: table of contents, bibliography, edition credits and notes. Remove them before generating.

If you'll hear a PDF once, sitting at your computer, use Edge or Acrobat Reader: they're free and instant. On a phone, for a quick listen, Speak Screen or Select to Speak is enough.

PDF to MP3 pays off for course material you'll go over several times, for a long document, or when you want to listen away from a screen: on the bus, on a walk, with no signal. Also for passing it to someone who won't open the PDF.

Sign in with Google and you get 600 free credits every month, about 10 minutes of audio: roughly 3 PDF pages, enough to hear how your document sounds before you pay anything. After that, every 1,000 characters cost 60 credits (about 60 per minute of audio). No subscription, and purchased credits never expire.