What The Tech App of the Day: ElevenReader
BY JAMEY TUCKER, Consumer Tech Reporter
Back to school means back to reading. Textbooks, research papers, class handouts and long articles can quickly pile up for students. But what if some of that reading could become something students listen to instead?
ElevenReader is a free app from AI company ElevenLabs that turns written material into remarkably realistic audio. Rather than the robotic text-to-speech voices we’ve been hearing for years, ElevenReader uses artificial intelligence to make the narration sound much more like a real person reading aloud.
And some of those voices are very recognizable.
Turn a PDF or Article Into Audio
ElevenReader is available for iPhone and Android. Students can paste text into the app, import an article from the internet, or upload documents such as PDFs.
Once the material is imported, users choose a narrator and start listening.
That could be useful for a student who has a long article or research paper to get through. Instead of sitting in front of a screen the entire time, the student could listen while walking across campus, riding the bus or doing something else.
It could also be particularly helpful for students who absorb information better by hearing it rather than only reading it.
Have Maya Angelou Read Your Homework
This is where ElevenReader gets especially interesting. The app offers hundreds of AI-generated voices. It also includes licensed AI recreations of
famous voices, including Maya Angelou, Sir Laurence Olivier, Judy Garland, James Dean and Burt Reynolds.
These aren’t simply the computerized voices you may be accustomed to hearing from Siri, Alexa or traditional text-to-speech programs. ElevenLabs’ technology can adjust things such as pacing and inflection based on the material being read.
For a demonstration, I uploaded one of my own What the Tech news scripts about gadgets for college students and selected Maya Angelou as the narrator.
She read: “Laptop screens won’t cut it with multiple projects going on at the same time. A portable monitor can be a game changer.”
The result sounds remarkably like the famous poet and author reading the script herself.
You Can Try ElevenReader for Free
Students don’t necessarily need a paid subscription to use ElevenReader.
The free version provides a limited amount of listening time each month for material users bring into the app. Paid plans provide additional listening time and other features.
That makes the free version enough to experiment with the app and determine whether listening to reading assignments is actually helpful.
Of course, ElevenReader isn’t a replacement for studying, and students probably shouldn’t outsource every bit of reading to artificial intelligence. There is still something to be said for actually reading the material yourself.
But for a long research paper, assigned article or class handout, ElevenReader provides another way to get through the material. And for students who learn better by listening, it could turn some of the most tedious reading assignments into something that sounds a lot more interesting.
Especially when Burt Reynolds is doing the reading.
