Listen to books, articles and documents with text to speech. Follow along sentence by sentence and switch back to reading at the same place.
A quiet moment can turn a page into a place to think.
One paragraph. A slower breath. A thought you might have hurried past.
You don’t have to finish everything today. There is something good about simply beginning.
LeafRead turns the text of a saved book, article or document into spoken audio. You can read a passage on screen, listen to the next part and return to the text when you want to look more closely. The library, the reading and your place remain connected throughout.
This is useful for material you already want to read: an essay saved earlier, a report you are working through or a book you have imported. You choose the source and the starting sentence. Text to speech gives that material a listening mode without requiring a separately recorded audiobook.
Open a saved reading, select the sentence you want to hear and press Play. The highlight follows the spoken sentence. If you need to check a term or reread a difficult paragraph, pause and look at the surrounding text before continuing.
Try a short passage first. It lets you hear the selected voice, check that an imported document reads in the right order and choose a comfortable playback speed. Sentence highlighting gives you a place to return to; it does not track each individual word.
A familiar article and a new technical subject may need different speeds. Start at a comfortable pace, then adjust it after a paragraph. Slow down for unfamiliar names or dense explanations, and replay a sentence when you need to hear its wording again.
Choose from the reading voices available in the player and use a sleep timer when you want playback to stop after a set period. New audio takes time to prepare, so a new passage may have a short wait. Listen to the sample on this page before starting with your own material.
For an article, paste its public link and check the extracted text. For a PDF, use a document with selectable text and inspect any columns or repeated page headers. For an EPUB, import a reflowable book without DRM and use its chapters to choose where to begin.
You can also paste a draft or upload a supported Word or text file. Hearing your own writing can give you another way to notice a repeated phrase or a sentence you want to revise. Keep the original nearby when formatting, figures or references are important.
Use the same account in the LeafRead app to access your library and saved position. Start playback in the app when you want to listen with the screen locked. Lock Screen controls let you pause and resume without keeping the reading page open.
For offline listening, prepare the audio in the chosen voice and download it before leaving your connection. Downloaded text and downloaded audio are separate things. New speech generation and synchronization still need internet access, so check that the material you plan to hear is ready on that device.
The current allowance is 350,000 newly generated characters per account per UTC day, shared between the website and app. Check Settings for your remaining allowance and reset time. Characters are counted from the text, so listening time depends on the material and playback speed.
Replaying audio that is still cached does not require new characters. Generating audio that is not already available, including for another voice, uses the allowance. Offline preparation also generates audio, so plan a long download with your remaining allowance in mind.
Use the voice previews and test a paragraph from your own material. English reading voices are available. Names, abbreviations and specialist terms can sound different from what you expect; check those passages against the written text when their exact meaning matters.
An article, a book or a document. Keep it in your library.
