Read a PDF aloud, free, in your browser

1. Press Choose a PDF, or drop the file on the box. Its text is pulled out in this tab; the pages themselves are not shown.
2. Open Contents to jump to any page. If the PDF has bookmarks, they are listed there too, as chapters.
3. Tap a sentence, or press the play button. The first time, your browser downloads the voice engine once; then the reading starts at that sentence and goes on to the end.

A PDF stores lines of print, not sentences, so a plain reader stumbles at every line end. Before anything is spoken, this page rejoins the broken lines into paragraphs, stitches hyphenated words back together, and leaves out page numbers and the headers and footers that repeat on every page. The sentence being read is highlighted, tapping another one jumps there, and the speed runs from 0.5× to 2.0×.

• PDFs with a text layer: articles, papers, reports, contracts, e-books, anything exported from a word processor or a web page. If you can select the words with a cursor, it can be read.
• Long PDFs. Only a sentence or two is prepared ahead of what you hear, so a 300-page report asks no more of your browser than one page.
• Two-column papers usually come out in the right order. Footnotes are read where they sit, at the bottom of their page.
• Other files as well: EPUB, Word (.docx), Markdown, HTML and plain text, through Open another file type. A book has its own page: the online EPUB reader.

For text that is not in a file, paste it into the read-aloud page. All 41 voices are available here, in six languages.

• Scanned PDFs cannot be read. A scan is pictures of pages with no text in it, and this page does not recognize text in pictures. It tells you when a PDF is a scan.
• Password-protected PDFs will not open.
• Tables, formulas and captions are read as plain text, in the order the file stores them, which can sound odd.
• There is no audio download: the PDF is read aloud on the page. The file is not kept after you close the tab; your place in it is remembered, in this browser.
• The voice engine is a one-time download the first time you press play (326 MB if your computer's browser has WebGPU, 92 MB if not, and on phones), stored by the browser for later visits.
• Phones are slower at this than computers. A PDF's text appears quickly, but a phone speaks it with pauses between sentences, because it makes speech more slowly than it plays, and it stops reading when the screen locks.

Privacy: the PDF never leaves your device, because it is opened there and not uploaded. Your text and audio never leave your browser.

For a long PDF you come back to over several days, there is Sandbook, the app: it reads PDFs aloud on iPhone and iPad, highlights the sentence on the page itself, opens the file where you stopped, and works offline, with everything kept on your device. It does not read image-only PDF files either; for printed pages it has a camera scanner instead, which turns scanned pages into speech.

The app is free, with no subscription and no in-app purchase. It needs an iPhone 12 or later, or an iPad with an A14 or M1 chip or later, on iOS 18.2 or later. One limit to know before you install: real-time reading pauses when the screen locks, so to listen with the screen locked you prepare the chapter's audio first.