- Any book, article or PDF, read aloud. A file, pasted text, a web address or an arXiv number.
- Ask as you listen, by voice or by typing. The answer knows only what you have heard.
- In your own voice, from three sentences read once.
- Local. Your books and your voice stay in this browser; only your questions go out.
Add a book or an article
Drop an EPUB, PDF, Word, Markdown or text file here, or
EPUB reads best. A PDF needs a text layer; two-column papers are best effort.
Please keep out documents with card numbers, Social Security numbers, passwords or other private details: when you ask a question, the part you have heard goes to the hosted brain.
Your books
Nothing here yet. Books and articles you add are kept in this browser only.
Question book
The questions you ask, the quiz questions and your bookmarks come back on a schedule: one answered right waits longer each time, a missed one comes back tomorrow. Revisit opens the book and asks the ones due, by voice or typed, graded on what you have heard of it.
Hear it in your own voice
Read three sentences aloud, once, and any book here is read in your voice. The recording is turned into a voice in this browser and is never uploaded; what is kept is a small voice profile, and you can delete it.
Local by design
- Your books and your voice stay in this browser. Nothing here is sent anywhere on its own.
- The narration and the speech-to-text run on this device. A voice you record is made and kept here; the recording itself is never uploaded.
- Only your questions go out, with the part of the book you have heard, to the hosted brain (a language model) that answers them for now. Nothing is stored by us.
- A web address you paste is fetched for you by this site's server, because a browser cannot read another site's page itself. The server hands the page back and keeps nothing; its text then stays here like a file you dropped in.
So please keep out documents with card numbers, Social Security numbers, passwords or other private details.
A current Chrome on a laptop is recommended; Edge and Safari work fine too.
Jane and Michael are synthetic voices made from openly licensed recordings of two speakers. Credits
How it works
Press Play and listen; tap any sentence to read from there. Ask by voice or by typing, and the answer comes from what you have heard so far, never from ahead. Record three sentences once, and your books can be read in your voice, made and kept on this device.
Before your first book, two minutes with how the reader works: the button, the keys, earbuds, voices, settings, and what is not here yet. That page grows as the reader does.
Yap all you want
Any honest review is welcome: what broke, what annoyed you, what you wish it did. One person reads it, the one who built this.
The sentence being read is highlighted. Tap a sentence, or reach it with Tab and press Enter, to read from there. What is still ahead is dimmed, and the answers below are given only what you have heard.
Ask
Answers come from a hosted brain for now: it sees your question and the part of the book you have heard, nothing more. The first question or two take a few seconds longer while speech-to-text loads and the voice warms up; after that, answers come quickly. How the buttons, keys and earbuds work.
Settings
Up to three spoken questions at each chapter's end, graded by the hosted brain, which sees the chapter and your answer.
Each spoken question's recording, transcript and answer, kept in this browser until downloaded or cleared.
Bookmarks, revisit and study material
Or say "bookmark this" or "note this: remember this for the exam" to the Ask by voice button while listening.
No bookmarks in this book yet.
Your questions, the quiz questions and these bookmarks come back on a schedule; Revisit asks the ones due, by voice or typed. Say "skip" to pass one, "stop" to end.
A Markdown sheet, flashcards (one per line, tab-separated) and the question book with its schedule, made here from what this browser kept.