Speechify alternatives: free readers, and one you can interrupt

I used Speechify for years to have articles read to me. Free readers now do most of that job, and the thing I wanted from Speechify was to stop the voice and ask why.

I build Understand, which is in the table below, so weigh my conclusion with that in mind.

Most people searching for a Speechify alternative want the same reading for less money. Prices are for the US and were checked on 3 October 2026.

Speechify's current plans

Speechify's pricing page lists a free plan with "10 robotic sounding voices" and speeds up to 1.5x. Premium is $29 a month, with a yearly plan the page advertises as 60% off; the App Store listing sells Premium Annual for $139.99. Premium has over 1,000 voices in more than 60 languages, speeds up to 5x, scanning of printed pages, and the voices of Snoop Dogg and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Premium also includes a Voice AI Assistant, which Speechify added to its Chrome extension in late 2025. It sits in the browser sidebar, and you can ask it out loud for the key ideas of the page or for a simpler explanation. Speechify's own list of commands includes "Quiz me on this", "Listen faster" and "Continue where I left off". The free plan is described as "Text to speech features only".

Speechify alternatives compared

The best free Speechify alternative

ElevenReader is the free reader I would install first. Ten hours a month is about twenty minutes of articles a day, and the free plan lists more than 1,000 natural voices. It takes PDFs, EPUBs and article links on the phone and on the web.

If ten hours is too few, the readers built into Edge, Chrome and Safari have no meter at all.

Reading PDFs aloud

On a laptop, open the PDF in Microsoft Edge and press Read aloud in the toolbar. Microsoft's documentation for the Edge PDF reader lists Read aloud as a built-in feature on Windows and macOS, with the spoken text highlighted as it goes. It costs nothing and needs no account.

A scanned PDF has no text in it, only pictures of pages, and Edge has nothing to read. Voice Dream Reader's App Store page says it can "recognize text for scanned PDF documents" on the device, and its voices keep working without a connection. At $79.99 a year it is the tool I would pick for a shelf of scanned books and long flights. Speechify Premium and NaturalReader both read printed pages photographed with the phone camera.

Readwise Reader reads PDFs aloud too, though only in its text view, and I would pay for it only if I also wanted its highlighting and notes.

Text to speech in the browser

Read Aloud, from LSD Software, is a free text to speech Chrome extension. The Chrome Web Store shows 6,000,000 users and a rating of 4.1 from 3,600 ratings, and the code is on GitHub under the MIT license. One click reads the article on the current page. It also handles PDFs, Google Docs and Kindle's web reader. By default it speaks with the voices your browser supplies, and the better cloud voices need your own API key or an in-app purchase.

The browser itself may be enough. In Edge, the menu has Read aloud under More tools, and Microsoft describes the voices as natural-sounding. In Chrome on a computer, right-click a page, choose "Open in reading mode" and press play; Google's help page says it downloads natural voices for your language. In Chrome on Android the menu item is "Listen to this page". It offers standard playback, which reads every word, and an AI playback that turns the page into a podcast-style conversation.

On an iPhone, Safari's page menu has Listen to Page. For text outside Safari, iOS has Speak Screen. Once it is switched on, swipe down with two fingers from the top of the screen and the phone reads whatever is on it.

Speechify's own extension is rated 4.6 on the Chrome Web Store, and NaturalReader's has 1,000,000 users and a 4.2. Both lead to a subscription. If you want to read articles aloud without paying, the browser already does it.

A reader for a saved list

Matter and Instapaper are read-later apps with a voice attached. Matter charges $8 a month for the HD voice. Instapaper's comparison table lists "AI Voices & text-to-speech playlists on mobile" under Premium at $5.99 a month. Either makes sense if the saved list is what you are paying for. As pure readers they cost more than ElevenReader's free plan and do less.

Kindle's Assistive Reader is free and narrow. Amazon's help page says it reads books bought or borrowed through the Kindle store that have Enhanced Typesetting, using your device's own text-to-speech voice.

Faster listening and understanding

Speechify sells speed. Its Chrome listing promises 900 words a minute. I listened fast for years and felt well read. When I tried to explain an essay I had finished that morning, I could give the topic and little else.

The research on learning describes that gap. In Roediger and Karpicke's 2006 experiment, students who reread a passage were more confident than students who had to recall it, and a week later they remembered less. Deslauriers and colleagues (2019) found that physics students felt they learned more from a polished lecture and scored higher after active exercises. I go through these studies, and their limits, in the post on Audible alternatives.

The readers in the table speak until the text runs out or you press pause. When a sentence lost me I could stop, open ChatGPT and describe the paragraph I was stuck on. Mostly I let the sentence go.

Speechify's assistant is aimed at this. Speechify's pages say it answers questions about the page on screen and that "Continue where I left off" resumes the reading. They do not say what happens when you start talking in the middle of a sentence, and I have not tested it.

Understand

Understand reads an article or a PDF word for word, one sentence at a time, with the current sentence highlighted. You interrupt by speaking. Ask "why does that follow?" and the reading stops, the tutor answers from the text, and the reading picks up by itself at the sentence where you cut in.

Spoken commands handle the rest: faster, slower, skip, go back, pause. "Summarize the rest" ends the reading with a summary of what is left.

Articles arrive through a saved list. A bookmark button in the app takes a pasted link, a Chrome extension saves the page you are on, the iOS share sheet saves from Safari or any app that shares a link, and X bookmarks sync once you connect your account. PDFs upload directly.

Understand also keeps a record of what you have understood. When you open a saved piece to talk about it, the tutor asks you to explain an idea before it explains anything. It records what you got right in a knowledge graph you can read and edit, and it treats an idea as understood only after you have succeeded with it in two different contexts. Having an article read to you adds nothing to that record. Other tutoring apps are compared in the post on AI tutors.

Things Speechify does that Understand does not

Speechify has more than a thousand voices, Snoop Dogg's and Gwyneth Paltrow's among them. Understand has one voice. Speechify goes to 5x and Understand stops at 2x. Speechify reads pages you photograph, and Understand has no OCR, so it refuses a scanned PDF with no text in it. Figures and charts are skipped, since only text is read.

Understand needs a connection for every sentence, so it is no use on a plane, and Speechify's iOS app can download a document as audio. There is no Android app. A PDF can be at most 25 MB.

Reasons to stay with Speechify, or to pick a free reader

Stay with Speechify if you listen above 2x or read from paper. Its assistant may also be enough for you; try interrupting it before you renew.

Pick ElevenReader or your browser's reader if the goal is to get through a newsletter while you do the dishes. Not everything needs to be understood, and most of what I save does not.

For the article you saved because you wanted to be able to argue with it, try a test. Have any reader finish it, then explain its argument out loud to an empty room. I failed that test often enough to build a reader that stops when I talk.