PDF to Audio: Read Any PDF Aloud Online, Free

Open the PDF on this page, pick one of 10 voices and the PDF's language, and press Play. SpeakCove reads it aloud in your browser for free, with no account and no page limit, and lights up each sentence on the page as it's read. The natural voices need WebGPU, which current Chrome, Edge and Safari support; the first Play downloads them once, about 100 MB. In other browsers it reads with your device's built-in voice. For apps that do the same on a phone, see PDF readers that read aloud.

Yes. When a PDF has no text layer at all, the reader recognizes the text on each page in your browser (a one-time download of a few MB per language), then reads it aloud. Every page is recognized before reading starts, a second or two per page, so a long scan takes a while. For photos and hard-to-read scans, the text recognition in the SpeakCove iPhone app works better.

Mostly. The reader follows the order in which the PDF stores its text, usually column by column. Headers, page numbers and footnotes are read where they fall, and a tap on any sentence skips ahead. The home page has papers from arXiv that open in the reader.

Yes. Save your draft as a PDF, open it here and listen while you follow the highlighted sentence. Hearing your text in another voice makes missing words, repeated words and clumsy sentences easier to catch than rereading it silently. A tap on a word on the page reads on from there, so you can replay a sentence after you fix it.

Yes. Pick the PDF's language from 31, including Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Hindi and Arabic, and the voice reads it in that language. For a scan, the language also tells text recognition which script to look for. Language learners can follow the lit sentence on the page while they listen.

There's no set limit. The PDF is opened in your browser, page by page, and the reader shows how far it has got. Big files take longer to open, and scans take longest, since every page is recognized first.

No. The PDF is opened and read inside your browser, and the voices run on your device. The file is never sent to SpeakCove or anyone else.

No. SpeakCove reads aloud live and doesn't create audio files, on the web or in the app. On a computer, this page keeps reading while you work in another tab. With its one-time Premium unlock, the SpeakCove app for iPhone and iPad keeps reading with the screen locked and in CarPlay, and it works offline.