In the last days, I received a premium subscription from Mr. Rohan Pavuluri from the Speechify team (thanks a lot ❤️) to test the application, so I took the liberty of writing a personal review of the platform and most of the features I can test. I love making honest reviews of products in my blog whenever I can, so it's quite important to mention that when I write an honest review (just as I mentioned in the titles), I'm being quite impartial and judging the product just as it is.
In a Nutshell
For those who don't like to read long reviews, I like to summarize and state upfront whether the product is worth it or not. Speechify is a legitim product, it's well developed, there's a great team behind the development of the platform, I'm sure of it (considering that I make web apps as well, you know I can just feel it). Indeed, after researching Speechify, the company is kinda huge, they have employees in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The product is great for the solution that it offers, reading content for you and integrating into your system to help you get things done faster.
The free limited plan is just great for someone who wants to test the product. The only problem I see as a user located in South America is the pricing for the premium plan. I mean, if I decide to buy the Full Speechify Experience monthly, it costs $29 per month ($348 if I pay monthly for a year). For someone on minimum wage in my country (Colombia), that'd be approximately 8% of a month's salary. However, they offer a yearly plan for $11.58 a month ($138.96 a year), which suggests they want you to compromise for a yearly subscription, still kinda high for someone in South America, but I'm sure for someone in the first world it might be just fair (yes, I know maintaining servers with GPUs to support AI models ain't cheap).
Pros 👍
- A great range of their voices feel natural (some don't), but with the premium voices such as Mr. Beast and Snoop Dog sound cool.
- Their application has an amazing OCR capability; all the documents that you send, no matter if it's a PDF in image format, they got you covered (most of the time).
- It's pretty well integrated with other applications (to select documents and the Chrome extension is a great tool).
- Cross-platform support, you can use it in your mobile devices and your desktop as well.
- It was designed with accessibility in mind by combining visual and auditory learning, which means that it is helpful for people with Dislexya and ADHD.
Cons 👎
- The product is not perfect, there will be some documents that won't be organized and interpreted correctly, so you may get confused with PDFs with a complex layout.
- In my personal opinion, it's pricey.
- There's no voice customization, you gotta stick with the voices that they provide.
- I gotta be honest, it doesn't handle complex syntax such as equations or programming code, it's good with plain text though.
- The privacy theme isn't that clear unfortunately, uploading files to the cloud might not be suitable for everyone, specially in enterprises.
There are amazing TTS applications out there and even wonderful AI conversational models being built, such as Sesame (test this wonderful demo here). Speechify is quite alright. As a developer, there are plenty of open-source solutions that you might consider as an alternative (such as GPT-SoVITS, TTS by Coqui AI). But if you're a regular user, Speechify might be just exactly what you need daily. Give Speechify a try!
Having said that, let's get started with the review of all the features that Speechify has to offer.
1. Web Application
Speechify offers a web platform that you can access at https://app.speechify.com/. In this online platform, you can use:
1.1. Library of uploaded documents
In the Speechify platform online, you can create your library of documents by uploading your file in different formats, such as:
- .docx (Word Document)
- .epub (digital eBook)
- XLSX (Excel)
- TXT (Plain text files)
The platform will allow you to link your Google, Dropbox, OneDrive, or Canvas account to select files from your cloud as well.
1.2. Speechify your documents
The uploaded files can be read by Speechify by any of the voices that they offer (including Snoop Dog voice) at the speed that you want. The voiceover will highlight the word that's currently being spoken, and you'll get a progress value that indicates how much of the document has already been read:
Something very worth mentioning is that they provide TTS for more than 50+ languages, from English, German, Spanish, Russian, and many others:
1.3. Prompt your documents with AI
Besides the TTS feature of Speechify, you will be able to use the AI module that allows you to prompt your uploaded documents, optimizing your reads by prompting important things about the document or even create a summary of the whole document easily (of course you will be able to Speechify your prompts results as well):
1.4. Convert your documents to MP3
Speechify allows you to convert your documents to MP3, You only need to select the voice that you want (including the language) as well as the pages or the whole document:
Within seconds or minutes (depending on the length of your document) the platform will allow you to start the download of the MP3 file:
In my case, the audio was 4 minutes long, and it took about 50 seconds to download. There's a limitation on the service, though, even on the premium plan, which is a limit on the generation of MP3 files; you will only be able to export 50 hours of audio per account in a year.
2. Chrome Extension
Speechify offers a Chrome extension that you can install on your device on any website or web application. After downloading, it is quite easy to get started, log in with your account, and you will be able to use it in 3 different ways:
For example, I was able to use it in my inbox, I could do my regular job as always, while listening to the emails I received yesterday:
3. Mobile app
There's a mobile version of Speechify for both Android and iOS. In my case, I have an iPhone and tested the app as well on there, where the concept is the same, you can choose files from your library that you can load from local sources or the cloud. Something interesting on the mobile app version is that you have access to free books that you can simply play with Speechify:
After selecting a free book, you can interact with it using Speechify:
Final conclusions
There are plenty of reviews about the free/trial and the premium version of Speechify, both positive and negative. So, as a regular consumer, I wouldn't say that Speechify is a scam; you need to test it and consider whether it's the kind of product that you're looking for and need, so be sure to use the trial that they offer and decide by yourself if you need to go premium or not. Do not buy directly the yearly suscription if you haven't tested the product, it's just common sense, you gotta test a product first with the trial, if it's of your liking, try the premium version for a month, if you end up loving, then upgrade with a yearly subscription if you consider it's worth for you.
Speechify is ideal for people who want to listen documents, articles and books on the go or anyone trying to multitask or consume content faster. In my personal opinion, the Chrome extension works excellently for reading content that I don't want to read by myself. It works in different languages, which makes it great for me as I'm from Colombia, and a big part of the content I read is in Spanish. I find the application optimal both on mobile devices and the web version. It works very fluidly in the frontend and the backend (everything works smoothly).
