Unlimited long documents, listened to like audiobooks
Most tools limit how much you can convert to audio each month. They either stop you at so many words or minutes, or charge extra for it. We do neither. Convert as many long PDFs as you like, however long they are, and listen to them like audiobooks: chapters, your place kept, screen off. £2.99 a month, cancel any time.
Upload the long one.
Listen like an audiobook.
Up to 50 pages, try it straight away, no account needed. For a longer one, create a free account first. It takes a few seconds, and your first document goes through whatever its length.
No cap on how much you convert to audio
Other tools let you listen as much as you like too, to the audio you have already made. The limit sits further back, on how much text you can convert in the first place. Some stop you at so many words a month on the good voices, or so many minutes. Others let you carry on and charge extra for it. A long document is a lot of audio, so that is the limit you meet first, and it is the one we do not have.
Convert a 500-page document. Convert another one next week. No word count, no page limit, no monthly allowance, and nothing extra to pay at the end of it. £2.99 a month.
Why it costs £2.99
Because of the voices. Ours are clear, natural and easy to listen to for hours on end. They are not the showcase voices you'll have heard in an advert, and that is the trade we have made on purpose. Those cost their makers money by the word, so the tools built on them have to pass that on, as a monthly allowance or as an extra charge.
Ours don't, so we have nothing to count. You get a voice you stop noticing after five minutes, and a price that doesn't stop you using it.
How long is a long document?
About a minute and three quarters a page, so roughly: dense prose runs a bit longer, a report with figures and tables a bit shorter.
Chapters, so nine hours is easy to move around
PageListener finds the chapters itself, with nothing to set up. Skip between them like any audiobook, and jump straight back to the one you want next time.
Stop wherever you are. It picks up at the exact second on whichever device you open next, so you can start on your laptop and carry on from the bus stop.
Listen while you're doing something else
Nine hours is a lot to find at a desk. It is almost nothing spread across a week of driving, walking the dog, the gym and an hour in the kitchen. You are spending that time already, and at the moment it is not getting you through anything.
That is the whole idea. Put the long document into the hours you cannot read in, and it gets done without costing you an evening. Screen off, phone in your pocket, headphones in, with the controls on your lock screen like anything else you listen to.
It works for whatever has been waiting longest: course handbooks and study texts, reports and board papers, policy and guidance, the research you meant to read months ago, your own drafts before anyone else sees them.
It suits prose. It doesn't suit equations
What it's for
Anything that is mostly sentences: reports, handbooks, guidance, course material, policy, history, essays, your own writing. English, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese.
What it's not for
Equations, proofs, chemical notation, code and dense results tables. Read aloud, a formula is noise. Scanned pages have no text in them, so we'll tell you at upload rather than let you find out later.
You can look at the page while it plays
The player shows the page being read, and turns it as it goes. Open the PDF itself and the audio keeps playing, so you can scroll and zoom to find a figure or check a page number. Or switch to follow-along, where the words light up as they're spoken, like lyrics.
Fifteen seconds back, thirty forward, and speeds from 0.9× to 1.5×. On a long one the slow end gets more use than the fast end.
Try it first. You get an hour of listening a month without paying anything. On a long document that is a chapter or two, enough to hear the voice on your own material and decide.
A free account also holds three of your own uploads: the first of any length, the next two up to 250 pages. Nine hours of listening is what Plus is for. It costs £2.99 a month, cancel any time, with no limit on length, uploads or hours.
Or start with something we've already made
If you'd like to hear what a long listen sounds like first, our Public Library has audio editions of public-domain classics, chaptered the same way, including the Sherlock Holmes stories and Jane Austen. They're included in a subscription, and they use the same listening hour as your own uploads.
Comparing tools? We wrote a comparison with Speechify, which does a great deal more than this and costs a great deal more.
Start with the one you've been putting off
Whatever has been sitting unopened longest is usually the longest one. Put it through and see. A single journey will tell you whether this is how you want to get through it.
Up to 50 pages, no account needed. For a long one, a free account takes a few seconds and your first document goes through whatever its length.