Listen to papers, PDFs, and articles with ElevenReader

ElevenReader (free for iOS/Android) will read articles and PDFs in realistic voices. Example clips here with Burt Reynolds, Maya Angelou, and Richard Feynman reading recent articles and preprints.

I get asked a lot how I have the time to read all these papers and articles I post about here. I don’t. Not all of them at least. I listen to many of them. Lately I’ve been using an app called ElevenReader, made by the popular text-to-speech service ElevenLabs. It’s free for iOS and Android. You give it a URL or upload PDF from your iCloud Drive and it’ll read the article to you in a realistic voice of your choosing.

Here are a few examples. In yesterday’s recap post I covered a preprint on benchmarking DNA sequence models for regulatory variant prediction. Here’s an excerpt of Burt Reynolds reading this recap.

It works with PDFs too. Here’s an excerpt of Maya Angelou reading the abstract of the recent Evo2 paper (PDF), covered here previously.

And here’s an excerpt of Richard Feynman reading our recent preprint, On the ancestry and evolution of the extinct dire wolf.

If you’re using an iPhone, you can add the ElevenReader app to your share tray, and send any article/PDF to ElevenReader.

The voices are more realistic than most other text-to-speech services I use. I use Instapaper to save things I want to read later. Instapaper has a read aloud feature, but it’s a robotic monotone that’s hard to follow. ElevenLabs/ElevenReader does a good job with natural cadence, intonation, and even changes certain things (e.g., like this), changing the “e.g.” to read aloud “for example” instead of “eee dot gee dot” like most other services would have. At the time I’m writing this ElevenReader supports 32 languages.

Give it a try: https://elevenreader.io/.