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Any app out there that does text-to-voice for scientific papers?

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Sometimes I want to read a paper but with my eyes closed lol. Really, I'm just looking for some kind of app that can read articles out to me while my eyes are tired from all the screen work. Just wondering if this exists. Probably a straight up text-to-voice but that can probably get dry fast.

I love podcasts or youtube videos that just dissect papers - it's the best way I've learned. Any suggestions for this (PS I am in evolutionary biology/genomics).

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You can just use the read-aloud feature of your pdf reader! It's not perfect, but that's the easiest way.

Adobe has a built-in read-aloud feature. But it's too slow imo, and there's not much you can control. The best I've found is.... Microsoft Edge! Just open the pdf in Edge, and in their read-aloud you can control speed, change the gender of the voice, and even listen in different accents.

I always 'hear' papers because without something to keep me on track, I'll just keep staring at a paragraph for hours. I'd love to find more options, but as of now Edge is the best I've got.

u/jadynfirehawk avatar

Yes and also the built-in text-to-speech features that most operating systems have nowadays. You can find the settings for it under Accessibility since they are originally intended for people with vision impairments.

Never knew about this but it worked amazing! Only tiny nitpick is when there's a lot of figures/tables in an article, but adobe doesn't fare much better in that case. I think you could click in adobe to choose the paragraph you want but edge makes you go according to the order it detects. overall very nice though thank you!

Thank you for this!

Oh my god, the tool I didn't know I needed.

Thanks for this.

it's surprising how good the read aloud feature of Microsoft edge is, I never heared anything like that tbf

u/Legal-Elderberry4851 avatar

But are there any that don’t read the in-text citations out loud?

u/CreateLoveLife avatar

Yes. Listening.Com

Not that I know of, sorry!

u/InkonParchment avatar

for anyone still searching, voicedream mentioned below skips in-text citations. Symbols can be programmed to be read how you like. However, it's quite expensive, so I might only use the free trial.

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The best I’ve found is VoiceDream. It’s a paid app, has different voices, and you can adjust the reading speed. It’s been able to handle my (social science) journals pretty well for the most part.

I also use voicedream, though I think when I downloaded it you just paid for the extra voices and not the app itself

u/investn40 avatar

How do you get it to deal with multiple columns?

u/MiserableBiscotti7 avatar

+1 for VoiceDream!

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u/NilsandCoe avatar

Audemic is an app designed specifically for this purpose. It lets you easily navigate between and listen to the different sections of the article. It also lets you do this on your smartphone, so you can listen to the research articles on the go.

It also has a key statements tab (powered by AI), which combined with the abstract can give you a really good overview of a paper in very little time.

Here's a link to the app: https://audemic.io/

Oh and its completely free at the moment!

u/BirdGal85 avatar

Unfortunately this is no longer free. At the moment subscriptions are $100 a year. There is a free option but it limits you to 2 papers a month.

Audemic can't really handle mathematical formulas, it either skips them entirely or reads just a couple of symbols in a formula.

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Following closely

Same here, even I am looking for something like this.

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Thank you for asking this!

Mac OS has a text to speech function I use to proofread things

This is such an awesome idea! I never thought to have a program "read" my drafts as a way of proofreading, but I'd bet it would work SO much better than me just reading through. Thanks!

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I use Natural Read mobile app for this same reason.

So far this option has been the best, free, most convenient text-to-voice speech for me. Thanks! It's not perfect (can't real formulas/variables properly) but for intros and discussions and lit reviews this is great. :)

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u/DerpAgency avatar

This popped up recently as an ad of Fb: https://www.getspeechify.com

Speechify is free and works well for me

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Hi, we have developed a system where you can train your research papers. It can extract data from tables, graphs and especially extracts text in the right order. This mostly an issue with current platforms. Besides that it's trained on the structure of your papers and writing style and will convert the output in same format. Send me a message for more details, we have a beta in the running for small group of organizations.

So you can create multiple knowledge bases with specific papers, load in new related papers about a subject you have. And let our trained model write out different papers, case-studies, whitepapers, etc.

Also the chunks issue we solved. We don't chunk in 1000 for example, we check how big/small the chunk should be so that relevant information stays in the chunk. This gives amazing results for researchers.

You can use this in your own created GPT in ChatGPT which works very well on your trained documents and papers. Switching between your own GPT and Consensus works very well for fast research.

Hit me up for more details :)

podcats or youtube videos that just dissect papers

There is such a thing? Where? How? I am intrigued

I've discovered that SAGE has a really nice video database around methods, if that's a thing that's helpful to you. I get access through my library system. https://methods.sagepub.com/video

No I wish there was. I'm lucky if I can find a conference and speakers on my topic.

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u/KamalTirmizi avatar

Used a couple including Voice Dream & Speechy but no app tested thus far does justice to academic writing. Hope it helps.

u/VictoriaSobocki avatar

Maybe otter.ai ?

u/LullabyWay avatar

I have not found any good app for this. Scientific papers has a lot of paratheses, which should be skipped, but these apps has not feature to skip those.

u/adam7447 avatar

I’ve that found that using the files app on my iPhone with the spoken content accessibility feature enabled in settings works decently well for transcribing papers into somewhat natural sounding language. All you really have to do is tap on the page you want it to read, and it usually does a pretty good job at following the body of the text. YMV depending on the pdf format and such. At least it’s free if you already have a newer iOS device.

what about a digital assistant in the lab with voice capabilities?

u/Own-Biscotti-1718 avatar
u/rkumar5 avatar

This is working for me well, including removing citations while reading!

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Certainly academic journals are challenging and only few apps can handle that reasonably well.

As Voice Dream has switched to 80$/year subscription recently, I think that the only app that covers this well (actually it might be on top as for example footnotes aren’t handled by other apps) and is also affordable is my app Speech Central.

You can read more details on how it can help for academic journals on this link: https://speechcentral.net/2023/08/31/how-to-choose-the-right-text-to-speech-tool-for-reading-academic-papers/

u/MBaggott avatar

Looks promising, though it failed to handle the header/footer info in the PDF of this annualreviews.org paper https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-soc-121919-054609

Thanks for providing the sample it will be helpful.

You cannot expect 100% accuracy with PDF.

PDF is specifically designed to provide the accurate visual representation and is the best in doing that. However for the logical representation of the text content, it is the worst file format by a huge margin. As it cares only about the proper placement of glyphs on the screen, in theory it can be even a complete meaningless mass of characters in it with proper coordinates that look well when printed.

So detecting the content is completely AI based with risks of both false negative and false positive conclusions. Further as the false positive is very unwanted (removing of useful content) that makes being biased to negative conclusions as optimal strategy. Which means that yes it will leave headers sometimes as optimizing for that use case may lead to worse problems.

Just to note that after some checking this feels like something that should be possible to be detected, so it's a very good spot from your side.

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u/Humble_Somewhere_175 avatar

What is the best one you have tried so far?

None. I gave up on it.

u/Humble_Somewhere_175 avatar

Thanks!

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Following for the same

Following for the same. I haven't been able to find any text-to-voice app that can deal with mathematical papers. All the ones I have tried either completely skip mathematical formulas or just read a couple of symbols, while ignoring others. This thus makes such apps completely useless for mathematical papers. Would be curious to hear others' experiences.