Turn a PDF into a podcast
A forty-page report is an hour you do not have at a desk, and twenty minutes you do have on a walk. Upload the PDF, pick what you actually want out of it — the gist, the argument, a set of notes — and listen to it instead of finding time to read it.
Up to 20 MB. Scanned pages have no text layer, so they cannot be read.
How it works
- 1Upload the PDFUp to 20 MB. It is read on our server to pull the text out and is not kept afterwards.
- 2Choose what to make of itA short summary to decide whether it matters, key insights for the substance, or full notes if you are studying it.
- 3Listen, or take the MP3Read aloud in a natural voice. Download it and it behaves like any other episode on your phone.
What actually gets read aloud
Not the PDF. A PDF read straight through is unlistenable: page numbers, running headers, figure captions and footnotes all arrive mid-sentence, and a table becomes a stream of numbers with no shape.
What you hear is what one of the tools wrote from the document — a summary, a set of insights, a page of notes. That is shorter than the original by a long way, and it reads as prose because it was written as prose.
If you need every word, read the PDF. This is for the far more common case where you need to know what is in it.
Scanned pages, and why they fail
A PDF made by exporting from a word processor carries its text as text. A PDF made by scanning paper carries a picture of text, and there is nothing to extract — which is why a scan produces an error here rather than an empty result.
The quick test is whether you can select a sentence with your cursor in any PDF reader. If you can, this will work. If the selection highlights a rectangle instead, the file needs OCR first.
Which tool for which document
The document type decides what is worth generating from it more than the subject does.
- A report or white paper: key insights, then the full summary if the insights hold up.
- A paper or study: notable quotes and comprehension questions, so you can check what you took from it.
- A textbook chapter: Cornell notes or flashcards, since the point is retention rather than a single read.
- A contract or policy: read it properly. A summary of a document whose exact wording is the point is a liability.
What happens to your file
It is uploaded, the text is pulled out of it, and the file is discarded. It is not stored, not indexed and not used for anything else.
The text goes to the AI service only when you press one of the tools. Uploading a document and reading the text back costs nothing and asks for nothing.
What it will not do
- Scanned PDFs and image-only files have no text layer, so there is nothing to read.
- Tables, figures and equations lose their structure when flattened to text, and a summary will treat them loosely.
- Reading and extracting text is free. The AI tools and the narration are part of the subscription.
- Files over 20 MB are rejected rather than truncated silently.
Questions
- Can I turn a PDF into a podcast?
- Yes. Upload it, choose a tool, and the result is read aloud in a natural voice and downloadable as an MP3.
- Is my file stored?
- No. It is read to extract the text and then discarded.
- Why did my scanned PDF fail?
- A scan is an image of text, not text. If you cannot select a sentence with your cursor in a PDF reader, there is nothing to extract.
- How long is the audio?
- It follows the tool, not the document — a micro summary of a 200-page book is still under a minute, and full notes run ten minutes or more.
- How large can the file be?
- 20 MB.
- Is it free?
- Uploading and reading the text is free. The AI tools and the narration are part of the subscription.