Hear your essay read back to you

1. Paste your essay or paper into the box. It takes up to 100,000 characters, about 16,000 words.
2. Press Start. The first time, your browser downloads the voice engine once; then your essay appears as paragraphs and the first sentence is read to you, highlighted where it stands.
3. Listen, then decide. The reading stops after every sentence: Next sentence moves on, Repeat sentence says it again, and tapping any paragraph starts from there. Edit the text takes you back to the box with your words as you left them.

The speed starts a little under normal, at 0.9×, because proofreading is listening for mistakes, not getting through the text; the slider goes from 0.5× to 2.0×. To hear the essay without stopping, untick Pause after each sentence: it is then read straight through, with a short silence between sentences and the highlight moving along.

When you read your own writing silently, you read what you meant. A voice reads what is on the page. That is why these are easier to hear than to see:

• A missing word, or a word typed twice.
• The wrong word that a spell checker accepts: form for from, quite for quiet.
• A sentence that runs so long the voice arrives at the end out of breath.
• Two sentences in a row that start the same way, and a paragraph that makes its point twice.

The page reads exactly what you wrote. It does not correct, rewrite or grade anything, so what you hand in is still your own work. For reading rather than proofreading there are other pages: one for having a PDF read aloud, one for reading any text aloud without the stops, and a guide to text to speech for students on iPhone.

• It is a listener's tool, not a checker. It will not underline anything or suggest a fix.
• It reads six languages: English (US and UK voices), Spanish, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Hindi. Pick a voice in the language of the essay.
• A sentence ends where its punctuation says so. A line with no full stop, such as a heading, is read as one sentence with whatever follows it in the same paragraph.
• The essay is read aloud on the page and has no audio download.
• Nothing is saved. Close the tab and the box is empty next time, so keep your essay in your own document.
• The first time you press Start there is a download: the voice engine, 326 MB on a computer with WebGPU in its browser and 92 MB otherwise or on a phone. It happens once; after that the engine loads from the browser in seconds.
• A computer suits proofreading better than a phone. On a phone each sentence takes longer to make than to play, so there is a wait before every sentence, and the reading stops if the phone locks.

Privacy: your essay is not uploaded. Your text and audio never leave your browser, because the voice is made on your own device.

For reading lists rather than drafts there is Sandbook, the app: it reads textbooks, PDFs, EPUB books and scanned handouts aloud on iPhone and iPad with the same voices, marks each word as it is spoken, and opens every book where you stopped. You can paste a draft into it as well. Everything stays on your device, and it works offline.

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.