Speechify - Text to Speech 4+

Im in a PA program and we use pretty dense textbooks and most of them are either online or PDF so speechify is great help me take in large amounts of info. My only beef with speechify is that I'm not able to click the links embeded in the text of the PDF to get specifially where I need to be in my huge textbooks. Also if I search a keyword it takes enormous amounts of time to load where that keyowrd is in the book. This makes the web app pretty useless for me so I just use the plug in where you can highlight passages and have it read to you but I feel I loose a few features using it this way. I hope that future updates allow you to click embeded links and allow you to search PDFs quicker.

Part of the issue is that text is in so many formats that the app struggles. Scientific/medical journals and textbooks are usually in a two column layout which the app struggles with. It also can't skip headers/footers very well. May online educational modules have background script that is read instead of the text that I highlight for the app to read. It also struggles in similar scenarios, eg online textbooks where it restarts from the first line even if you're hundreds of pages deep, and there's no way to start where you want it to.

The screenshot functionality could be a workaround for this if it was more efficient, but there is no shortcut for it in the desktop app (very unclear why everything else has a customizable shortcut). Unfortunately you can't queue up screenshots either (but that would be more of a bonus than a necessary feature). The chrome app has a screenshot function (with shortcut) but it struggles with scrolling/clicking while reading from a prior screenshot.

Overall, $140 is a big ask for an app that mostly just increases efficiency reading online news articles and blogs. Although the OCR functionality is impressive, it still really struggles in a lot of real world use cases.

This app got me through a really hard time academiclly and I am incredibly greatful. I have a disability, so speech to text is very important to me. However the glitches are getting worse.

On mobile (ios), it will get confused and reread lines then jump forward to catch up as if it was reading the correct stuff the whole time. On Mac computer, there is an ad telling me to subscribe to premium (which I already have!) that has been popping up in the middle of the screen blocking every other window on the computer so I have to try to move it out of the way, but it will refresh and jump right to the center of the screen. I can't close it despite there being a x at the top and I can't fix it by clicking "start trial". I tried uninstalling but it wouldn't let me because it and installing and it's still here.