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A year ago I was trying to rewrite a literature review for my thesis, to do that I had to read a lot of other people’s research papers so I could find out what they did, what their position about the research was and any tips or issues they found during their work.
While I generally like reading, I struggle reading research papers, especially the amount of papers I had to read for that part of my thesis alone. This is partly due to being dyslexic and partly due to having ADHD – when I can get myself focussed enough to read, I then find it hard to read.
I have worked out various strategies to help over the years, a particularly helpful one is being able to use my iPad to read and make notes on the PDF of the papers. I use the assistive colour filters that are built into Apple products (iPhone, iPad, MacBook…) so that when I press the assigned button a blue colour is added to the screen which works like I’ve used a coloured overlay over the page.
If I have to use paper based documents I print to sky blue paper, or if I need to read something on white paper then I use a blue plastic sheet which does the same as the iPad, and makes the page blue and therefore easier for me to read.
While these are all helpful, I’ve had to read so many papers my eyes were struggling, so I looked for a way to get the computer or iPad to read the papers out to me. After a bit of a search I found several apps that could read the documents out loud to me, but as before when I’d used a reading app that I had as part of a software package I used in my undergraduate degree, the voices mostly sounded really robotic and fake. It was never a pleasant job to listen.
This time however, I found Speechify and things changed dramatically.
Speechify has a range of different voices, some are available to use in offline mode (so fine for using on the train when there’s no data signal and the wifi is not working), and there are some really good AI voices – yes AI voices – while I don’t like a lot of AI applications around right now, these voices are a very good use of AI and have made the world of difference to me as they are not painful to listen to.
Of course I have had some issues, mostly when the PDF is laid out in a strange way so the app reads the content in a strange order or misses bits entirely (definitely PDF issues as I had to look at what was going on), but overall using Speechify has saved me hours and so much eye strain!
I also have to mark a lot of student work, particularly projects, which have a literature review then go on to talk about what the student did and found put during their project. These assignments are anywhere from 10,000 words to 12,000 words. Reading them with my normal supports mentioned above is time consuming and as I know how long they will take to do and how tired reading them will make me, my ADHD brain doesn’t want to do them so they were often being done in individual blocks of time and took a good few hours to just read through let alone give feedback on.
Speechify has really helped speed this up, I can listen whilst walking to and from the office on my iPhone with headphones, and use the notes app to record my thoughts as I need to (being careful not to walk into lamp posts or people obviously!).
I can listen sat at my desk at work, or in the coffee shop, in the library, or on the train, the listening can just get done where ever and whenever.
As my students often include chunks of code they’ve written in their PDF’d report, that gets read out to me too – sometimes that’s not very helpful but goes to show how well Speechify recognises all text and reads it out! When this happens, I either get it to skip to the next written part or pause to look at the code then skip to the next bit of text and let it carry on reading it to me.
According to the Speechify app on my iPhone, I’ve saved myself over 62 hours already, although I would actually say that number is a lot higher knowing how long some of these tasks would normally take me.
Speechify also lets me listen faster, slower, or at normal speed – this is great for me as I’ve found my ADHD brain needs to have the speed set between 1.5 and 2.0 for the most part depending on what I’m listening to. I found I got distracted easily listening to audiobooks so never really liked them until I discovered that changing the speed really makes a difference (as much as the narrator), so I automatically did this in Speechify.
Speechify isn’t only there to help you listen to the work and study related papers and books, it can read you your Kindle books, emails, scanned pages, web pages, and it can connect to your Google drive, iPhone Files, and Dropbox, plus other things I haven’t needed to connect to yet.
For me, particularly with ADHD and dyslexia, with a job that involves a lot of reading (and that’s on top of my own studying), Speechify has been a massive help and I’m glad I spent the money to have full use of it. While it did seem a lot of money initially, the benefits to me since getting it have meant that it has paid for itself from the stress and time it has saved me.
I was fortunate enough to get a discount when I paid for my first year of Speechify, which did soften the initial blow to my bank balance, and if you want to try Speechify out for yourself and decide to purchase it, if you use my code you can get $60 off too!
Use my referral code to get a $60 discount on Speechify.
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