Speechify vs. Eleven Reader: Which Text-To-Speech (TTS) Reader Is Best?

Back in the Internet stone age of the mid-aughts, we once wrote a post about how newspapers (remember those?) needed to add functionality that let users listen to audio versions of every article, whether it was via a real human reader or the robotic voice-to-text options available back in 2007. As is the case with most of our awesome ideas, no one listened; however, we now know that we were just wayyyy ahead of our time. It only took 18 years, but there are now two big fish out there battling for “best app that reads stuff to you out loud” — Speechify and Eleven Reader. And since we started all this back when you were still getting bullied in elementary school by Avril Lavigne fans for your undying love of Josh Groban, we obviously had to continue the conversation by reviewing both apps.

First, though, let’s clarify why I’m using these TTS apps, which obviously is going to influence my opinion. My wants are modest and straightforward. There’s a ton of information out there on the Internet that I’d love to sit down and read every day, but I can’t possibly do it because of the other things that life requires of me. I can’t read with my eyes while driving, showering, working, exercising, serving hundreds of people every day at a soup kitchen and giving free vaccinations to poor children (shut up, you don’t know) — but I can listen while doing all of those things. And that’s just the timely stuff. Like you, there are thousands of books out there I wish I had the time to read, but don’t. The ability to easily and quickly transform all of this stuff to audio that can then freely flow into my knowledge-hungry ears at all hours of the day and night — that’s what I want from a TTS app. A wide array of voices? Don’t care. Just give me a couple that sound human and can pronounce words correctly, and I’m good.

Now, first up, Speechify.

Speechify Review

Speechify is a popular text-to-speech app known for its celebrity voices and its catchy -ify name, which clearly is meant to co-opt the trustworthiness of billion-dollar unicorns Spotify and Shopify. And while it does have a few high points, it’s a big disappointment in terms of reliability and user experience. Here’s the rundown:

Key Points

• Premium Voices: Speechify offers high-quality, natural-sounding voices, as well as celebrity options like Snoop Dogg, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Mr. Beast. These voices add up to a pretty cool listening experience, especially Mr. Beast and Gwenyth (Snoop is fun as a novelty, but for whatever reason, his voice doesn’t translate very well to long-form reading, although your mileage may vary). A hidden gem is also the voice called “Mr. President,” which is an absolutely immaculate reproduction of Barack Obama, and the best voice of not only Speechify, but any other TTS app as well. Not sure why they can’t come out and call it Barack Obama, but I also don’t really care.

  Oh, and you’ll also find Cliff Weitzman in the premium celebrity voice section. Oh wait, you don’t know who Cliff Weitzman is? Of course you don’t; he’s the CEO of Speechify. RED FLAG CEO HUBRIS ALERT: When your CEO insists that his face and voice be included, client-facing, among the million-dollar A-List talent, you can be sure things are going to end badly. I don’t want to foreshadow too much here, but with an ego like that at the helm, you can expect a steady flow of bad decisions that no one’s allowed to question, while the products goes from annoying to shitty to almost unusable. But I digress.

• Cross-Platform Accessibility: Available on multiple platforms, including iOS, Android, and web, Speechify allows purports to allow users to access their content across devices. This feature is would be particularly useful for starting and stopping your listening experience, let’s say, from your daily exercise routine (on your phone) to your browser when you’re back at work, or vice versa. If it worked. Which it doesn’t. More on that later.

• Web Interface and Chrome Extension: The web interface and Chrome extension are pretty great, and the (possibly) sole reason I maintain a subscription to Speechify. Come across anything at all on the web that you want to read later? Just install the Chrome extension and click it whenever you come across something worth saving, and Speechify will save it to your library for later. It is, for the most part, seamless and efficient; ads and other extraneous text aren’t always filtered out correctly, but I can live with that.

Performance and Reliability Issues

• Buffering and Stuttering: I can’t emphasize this one enough: how often they happen, and how maddening they are when they do. I can be walking around a building with a massive, powerful, full wifi signal, with every other app and connection running smoother than a baby’s ass cheek, and guess what happens with Speechify? A couple minutes in…here comes the 90s-style connection buffering and stuttering, followed by the horseshit explanation that my internet signal is weak. But it’s not weak. It’s reliably excellent, yet the app constantly struggles to maintain smooth playback, making it unreliable for mobile use (especially so if your hands are full). I postulated to Speechify support that perhaps the mechanism that detects the signal strength was faulty (I’m not a software engineer, so maybe that’s nonsense, but I at least wanted to put it out there). As was constantly the case, they didn’t bother to respond.

• Voice Switching: After the signal drops — and sometimes even when it doesn’t! — Speechify will randomly switch to a robotic offline voice when it “detects” a poor internet signal. Which, again for emphasis, happens frequently even with a strong connection. This results in frustrating voice switching and buffering, requiring manual intervention to restore premium voices. Boo. Seriously, booooo x 100.

  Here’s why: this app, as I’ve communicated to Speechify, has revolutionary potential, beyond even what their biggest internal cheerleaders are aware of. Imagine all the PDFs out there — books, magazines, work documents, emails, how-tos, etc. — that a person could be absorbing during the previously insufferable times of day, like one’s daily commute for example. Commuting is no longer a grind when you can listen to something you enjoy, or that gives you the kind of self-improvement that you’re looking for. But you know what kills it? Trying to one-hand and one-eye a re-establishing of your connection and switch to your premium voice while the other hand is on the steering wheel and the other eye is trying to avoid causing a pileup in the traffic jam.

  And what about exercising? We now know, for example, that rucking (weighted walking, walking with a backpack, whatever you want to call it) is one of the most efficient calorie burning activities there is, and anyone can do it (as opposed to running, cycling, and other more intense forms of exercise). The only limiting factor is boredom, which can easily set in once you’ve done your music playlists to death. But with a TTS app, it’s a whole new ballgame. Did the goal of being “well-read” pass you by? It’s not too late; download a couple dozen classics (many are free in the public domain) and, in a couple of months, be the person who’s read everything Hemingway ever wrote. Or blast through an entire beach-read series, or decide that you’re going to “read” everything Stephen King ever wrote, or whatever you want to dive into. Be done with the “oh, that book looks interesting, wish I had time to read it” line that you’ve been telling yourself for years. TTS apps provide an easy, mostly free way to become fully educated on just about any topic you want. But damnit, if the app freezes every three minutes, the frustration will outweigh the desire to impress your friends about actually making it through War and Peace.

• PDF Handling: Claims of seamless PDF handling between devices are absolute nonsense, I’m afraid. Good luck trying to access PDFs loaded via the web interface on your mobile device, and vice versa; not gonna happen. On the target device, your PDF will be either “opening” or “processing,” and in both cases, your screen flashes indefinitely, until your patience runs out and you’re cursing the app, wondering why no one’s told Cliff that this shit doesn’t actually work. It’s maddening.

Customer Support

• Unresponsive Support: Speechify’s customer support has been criticized for being unresponsive and unhelpful, and boy, is that ever the understatement of the year. I provided Speechify support with what surely was the longest and most detailed ledger of feedback they’ve ever received, and over a period of a week, I got no answer for a few days, and then a “we updated the app, try again” (after which, surprise, nothing was fixed). It’s one (very bad) thing to have an app beset with technical issues; it’s an entirely other (very very much worse) thing to invite customers to report them to you (via a support link), and to have that support give you the finger (more or less) when you provided a detailed roadmap of what’s going wrong. Booo.

Speechify Final Verdict: Deeply flawed, still useful

Speechify has potential with its advanced AI voices and cross-platform accessibility, but it is marred by massive performance issues and shitty customer support. The buffering, voice switching, and PDF handling problems are untenable for someone who needs/wants a one-stop solution, and make it less reliable than competitors like Eleven Reader. It’s the inferior of the two I’m reviewing here today, but I do still recommend using it, if alone for the web interface/Chrome extension. Also, “Mr. President’s” voice is absolutely superlative for reading certain types of content (provided you aren’t among those triggered to the point of outburst by Barack Obama’s voice — for those folks, and for users seeking a seamless and reliable TTS experience, Eleven Reader may be more suitable).

Tips For The People At Speechify:

1. Fix the PDF problem & be honest about it: You currently advertise that Speechify is seamless across devices, when you know that it’s not, and have known that for a long time. Stop that shit, and then, fix that shit. Yes, you may have to drag Cliff Weitzman kicking and screaming from his podcast tour and inspirational-dyslexia speeches, but if you don’t fix it, there’s not going to be a Speechify anymore, because Eleven Reader will put the final nails in your coffin.

2. Fix technical issues that torpedo the user experience: The constant voice switching and signal-dropping are dealbreakers if you happen to be exercising and listening to Speechify.

3. Credit where due: For the ability to quickly snag content from here, there and everywhere off the web and save it for later listening, Speechify is still the best. And Barack Oba – err, Mr. President — is the best reading voice on any platform. Also, the maximum playback speed on Speechify is 4x, far better than the 3x you find on Eleven Reader. (How to read and retain at speeds like this is a whole other post, but TL;DR: you absolutely can, if you do it right).

4. Enough burning cash on celebs: Celebrity voices, by and large, are novelties that wear off quickly. Gwyneth Paltrow has a silky smooth voice suited for all kinds of content, but so does every other AI voice in the package, so no need to go spending millions more on other celeb voices. If you were a navigation app, then sure — customers would love to cycle through the small bites of SpongeBob, Kendrick Lamar or Sydney Sweeney telling them “In two miles, use the right two lanes to take Exit 42.” But for longer-form reading — nah. Wears out quickly. (And for God’s sake, Cliff, remove yourself from the celebrity roster. Now. Seriously.)

Eleven Reader review

The Eleven Reader app from Polish company ElevenLabs is another TTS application that transforms any text into lifelike audio. It’s an excellent, if not perfect, TTS app that I use for my main reader for PDFs. Here again is my review of Eleven Reader, pros and cons and warts and all.

Key Points

• Everything works: I don’t love that my review of Eleven Reader is anchored by the absence of huge technical issues, but Speechify being what it is…here we are. You add a PDF to Eleven Reader, pick a voice, and it’s gonna work, just fine, as long as you’ve got any kind of Internet connection at all. Wanna exercise or drive while you’re listening to a PDF with Eleven Reader? Go for it.

• Content Compatibility: The app seamlessly handles various formats, including articles, eBooks, PDFs, and web pages. Users can import their own text, paste web links, upload documents, or even scan printed text using the app’s efficient scanning feature.

• Playback Control: ElevenReader allows users to adjust playback speed from 0.25X to 3X, ensuring flexibility for different listening preferences. Speechify’s 4x is better for power/speed-reader/listeners (here’s how to become one), but 3x certainly isn’t a dealbreaker. The under 1.0 speeds can be useful if you’re using these apps to practice listening to and understanding a foreign language you’re interested in learning.

• Library and Content Selection: The app comes with a preloaded library of hundreds of free books, newsletters, and articles, which is cool as shit, I think. You can obviously personalize your library however you like, but it was an extremely smart move to pre-load it with public domain literature, and other magazines, blogs and newsletters. Takes away the “analysis paralysis” we often feel when you have infinite options.
  

• Celebrity Voices, Part II: Eleven Reader also has a small roster of celebrity voices of a different type: all the celebrities are dead. This is genius, really; I have to assume that it’s much easier to negotiate licensing fees with people who can’t negotiate, because they’re dead. (OK sure, they have estates, but being dead probably has considerably lessened the demand for their services, so they can be gotten for a fraction of what Snoop or Mr. Beast charges). The passed-on folks who will currently read to you on Eleven Reader are currently: Burt Reynolds, Maya Angelou, Richard Feynman, Jerry Garcia, John Wayne, Deepak Chopra, Sir Laurence Olivier, James Dean and Judy Garland.

  This has to be the most brilliantly-conceived set of dead celebrity voices ever, clearly designed to satisfy every person at your awkward and tense Thanksgiving dinner table. There’s Burt for the Boomers (men want to be him, women want their husbands to be him as well), Maya Angelou for the college freshmen back for break, John Wayne for your racist grandpa, Jerry Garcia for your weird hippie aunt, Richard Feynman for your weird hippie aunt’s inexplicably overeducated common-law husband (why TF is he with my aunt? he’s read more books this year than our entire family has read — combined — since they’ve been alive), Judy Garland for your LGBTQ family who decided to give it one more shot with Grandpa this year since who knows how much longer he’ll be around, James Dean for your brother who’s here because he got a day pass from rehab, Deepak Chopra for your sister-in-law who still thinks she’s going to retire on Lululemon revenue in five years, and Sir Laurence Olivier for your English teacher you invited because she’s all alone after her cat got hit by a car.

  Phenomenal.

Thumbs Down

• Hopping Around: ElevenReader ain’t perfect. On the technical side, here’s a big pain in the ass: sometimes I’ll stop listening to a PDF book and close the app, and when I come back to it — it’s moved me back dozens of pages/up to an hour backward, for reasons I can’t discern. That’s the biggest and most frequent annoyoance of Eleven Reader. I’m listening a while, I get out of the car to do whatever, come back to the car, turn my book back on, and boom — I’m hearing the same shit I heard an hour ago. Bruuuuuuhhhhhhh. Major, major annoyance.

• Big Brother Is Watching: This may be a dealbreaker for some of you: basically, Eleven Reader is monitoring your library content. How, and to what extent, I don’t know, but a particularly ugly incident marred my initial impressions of Eleven Reader. This is a long story, but you really have to listen to it if you’re going to consider Eleven Reader.

  After my repeated disappointments with Speechify, I discovered Eleven Reader (thanks, random commenter in the Speechify reviews in the Google Play Store), and immediately became very, very bullish on it. Spent many hours loading up my library, was burning through a book per day, and it was really changing my life for the better. Then one day, I go to log in to the app, and boom — I get an error, my account has been cancelled for “prohibited use policy.” I’m baffled and assuming a mistake…how tf can I violate a policy by listening to books? I write support and say:

  I woke up today to find you had banned my account for unspecified violation of prohibited use policy, and I ask that you reinstate it because it must be a mistake. I am a power user and over the top brand evangelist for this app …I have entire content plans ready to promote the app on channels where I teach people that they can be well-read using the reader app (after weeks of enduring the bugginess of speechify). I have assigned daily work to my virtual assistant to add all the articles from certain publications to my daily reading list. I’m also sure you can see what an incredible amount of work and time I’ve spent building my library. Please reinstate my account and let me know what triggered the ban, because this is actually really devastating to me; I build my days around consuming hours of audio material with this app. Look forward to speaking with you, thanks!

  This’ll be fixed soon, I tell myself. But a few hours later, this bomb lands in my inbox.

  Thank you for reaching out.

  Access to your account has been permanently disabled due to violations of our Prohibited Content and Uses Policy, specifically content involving sexual material related to minors. 
   
  Upon reviewing your account activity, due to the severity of the violation, we are unable to lift the ban on your account at this time.

  OK, whooooooooooooooaaaaa. I don’t know what in the ever-loving f**k these MFs are talking about, but they just picked a fight that they weren’t prepared for. One, I definitely want my damn library and app back, because I wasn’t exaggerating about loving the app and integrating it into my life. But uh, second, elephant in the room: what the F**K did you just accuse me of? Sexual material related to minors? Are you MFs out of your goddamned mind? Suffice it to say, dear readers, that there sure as f**k wasn’t, isn’t, never has been and never will be any goddamned “sexual material related to minors” in my library. I do have an idea, though, what may have triggered some kind of automated review — the fact that, within the previous week, I listened to “Tiger, Tiger” — a stomach-turningly detailed memoir of a young girl who was repeatedly violated by an older neighbor throughout her entire childhood. That’s gotta be it. But I’m not any less pissed off, because — well, insert your favorite example of a book being banned or blocked because it told a valuable but difficult story about sex, drugs, race, violence, what have you.

  So now we’re gonna scrap, and it’s gonna get ugly. I’m super pissed, and I write back:

  There is no possible way that you found sexual material related to minors in my account. You certainly may have seen that I recently read “Tiger, Tiger” by Margaux Fragoso, which is an acclaimed memoir of a girl who endured sexual abuse for years by a neighbor. Please Google it.
  I don’t know what type of systems you use to flag such content, but any kind of content scanning of that book would certainly reveal stomach turning abuse of the protagonist – which is the entire point of the memoir.
  So, you’ve made an error, and a serious one given your accusation. If your algorithms flagged literature as child sexual material, then clearly that’s a problem with your algorithm. I expect a response that reinstates my account, restored my library to its previous state, and an apology before the day’s end.

  And Eleven Labs responds by…not responding. They literally go dark. They think they’re gonna ignore me. But as any spurned lover who boils your child’s pet rabbit on the kitchen stove will tell you…”I’m not gonna be IGNORED!” I look up the CEO and CTO of ElevenLabs, Piotr Dabkowski and Mati Staniszewski, and I find their individual email addresses, and I begin emailing them.

  This page is too long already so I don’t want to make it eve more ridiculous, but in sum, I repeated what I’d said before to customer service, and I told them that it can’t be every day that someone tracks them down and basically begs them to reinstate a banned account. I’ll just include this bit: You guys have my library — look through it and see for yourselves. But getting right to the point: a) I want my account back right away, please, with my library properly restored. b) This is a serious problem that you should address right away with whatever detection systems you happen to use. I’m sure you’ll find plenty of compliance among users if you’re scanning the content they’re reading to uncover otherwise abhorrent things, but that system has failed catastrophically if it’s led you to falsely accuse someone of promoting or child sexual material. It’s failed even further if that mistake causes you to hit a button and destroy countless hours that an extremely motivated brand ambassador has invested in *your* product to encourage people to use it more and become the market leader in the space (which it deserves to, because Speechify is a buggy nightmare at this point). (Man, I just could not stop kicking turtled-up Cliff and Speechify, could I?)

  I use email tracking software and I saw that Piotr and Mati were both reading it multiple times (yeah, I can monitor you hoebagz, too). After 48 hours they hadn’t responded, so I followed up with another email that politely said I wouldn’t be going away, and this wouldn’t be over until they restored my account and apologized. Five days later, they did the right thing:

  Thank you for your patience while we thoroughly reviewed the additional information you provided. The content generated on your account was initially flagged as potentially violating our Prohibited Content and Uses Policy, specifically under “1. Do not threaten child safety.“
   
  This content was identified through automated means, which led to the account ban being issued. However, after a detailed review, we have determined that this content should not have been flagged.
   
  As the generated content was limited to the Reader app specifically, we have lifted the ban from your account. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this might have caused and as a token of our apology, we have added some additional characters to your account.
   
  We continuously monitor and evaluate user activity to ensure responsible use of ElevenLabs products. Please note that any future violations of our Prohibited Use Policy will be reviewed by our moderation team for appropriate action.
  
  I certainly don’t love how they behaved while I was banned and the degree I had to pursue and pester them to get reinstated, but, credit where due, I respect that they ultimately corrected their error. ANYWAY…I recited all that to let you know that yes, via automation, Big Brother is monitoring what you read with Eleven Labs. Personally, I don’t give a shit — all you’re gonna learn about me is that I read a huge amount of content of all types — but not everybody feels the same way, especially when the monitoring isn’t clearly stated from the outset. And if someone out there reading this is actually, really reading that kinda shit — for the love of god, delete it all and then go get help, before you end up shanked in a prison shower.

  Once more, with feeling: I tell you that story because I feel I owe it to anyone reading me NOT to withhold that information, because I know it’ll deeply offend some people. Despite the ugly beginning, I remain pretty head-over-heels in love with the Eleven Reader product.

Comparison to Speechify

• Voice Quality: ElevenLabs and Speechify both have plenty of great voices that sound like real humans. In this department it’s a dead heat, you’re a winner either way. For me personally, nothing beats the Barack Obama voice, but Burt Reynolds is a helluva close second.

  Scanning is also a dead heat. I didn’t mention it in the Speechify section, but with both tools, you can hold your phone up and scan book or magazine articles page by page, or whatever else in the physical world you may want to scan for later listening. I don’t personally find this super useful myself so I don’t pay it much attention here. I could see it having value if, once in a while, you needed to read a very long article at some point and would prefer to take 10 minutes scanning each page, so you could listen to it in the car or something. That actually makes a lot of sense, but it’s definitely in the “use only on special occasions” column for me.

• Features: Both apps provide multiple ways to get content into your library, so I’d call this a dead heat, possibly leading slightly toward Speechify. Speechify used to, very reliably, crash every time you uploaded a large PDF, and had a hard limit on PDF sizes you could upload; however, I tried uploading two huge PDFs today and Speechify handled them like a charm, and I saw no reference to the previous size limit. I don’t have any problems uploading PDFs of any size to Eleven Reader either, but big PDFs take much, much longer than they do on Speechify, now that they’ve fixed those problems I just mentioned.

• Languages supported: At last look, Eleven supports 32 languages and Speechify claims to support 60+ on the home page, 30+ in the help documentation, but when listed, I count 28. Very cool for both of them, and I support what matters most is if they support the language you yourself speak. If you’re successfully reading this in English, you’re covered.

Final Verdict: Eleven Reader is the stronger choice (but I still use both)

ElevenReader stands out as the best text-to-speech app that I’m aware of, surpassing Speechify solely because of all the technical problems Speechify seems beset with. Both of their customer service departments have left a bad taste in my mouth, so that’s a push. Here’s the main takeaway, though: both of these apps have life-transforming potential, and I say that with no hyperbole, and having lived it myself. In the past year, I’ve read over 300 books. Big, full, long, grown-ass-man books: histories, biographies, business, tech, war, politics, science, etc. Without these two apps, I wouldn’t have read 300 more books before dying. 100% true. My eyes are spoken for during too many hours of the day, and the rest of the hours, well, you gotta sleep sometime. The genius of the apps is that they allow you to maximize down time you didn’t know you had, with almost zero extra effort. Where to find things to read? There’s another post for that.

But I’m not exaggerating here. Pick a few subjects that interest you and read 3-4 books about each, then see how you feel. You’re smarter and more confident (as you should be, because you’re smarter), and your esteem, both self and in the eyes of others, rises.

Do you work in an office? Knock out 4-5 books about your industry over the next couple months, then show that knowledge and motivation at work, and you’ll get promoted.

Do you work in fast food? Blow through a few customer service books, maybe biographies of whoever founded your restaurant chain, and casually mention in your everyday conversations with your boss that you read them. You’ll get promoted way faster.

Do you work in the trades? Read “Extreme Ownership” by Jocko Willink, which teaches responsibility and leadership. Read “Leaders Eat Last.” Read “Atomic Habits” and “Never Split The Difference.” And yes, by “read” I mean “listen to the audio version of.” There are a few people who still argue with me about this on Twitter, but there’s a post for them, too.

These apps give everyone a chance to improve their lives just by listening to music (or listening to nothing) a little less often, and substituting audiobooks and articles. So I’ve set the table for you here (an insanely too-long, nearly 5,000 word table, which I apologize for), but I can’t make you eat. You gotta do that yourself.

NOTE: If you click on my links to Speechify, I don’t get paid, but I do get $60 toward my annual membership. I don’t make anything if you click my links to download Eleven Reader, but if you sign up for any of their other paid products (there are a ton, if you want to produce your own content: AI voice cloning, turning audio into text, and all kinds of very cool shit I didn’t address here because it doesn’t have anything to do with reading/listening), I think they’ll give me a 22% kickback or thereabouts (I can’t quite remember because I’ve never referred anybody to any of this stuff. But hey, this is the most thorough review of these apps on the entire Internet, past present and future, so I deserve a crumb or two, eh?)