Leave a Review Listening
Much better than speechify if you want to read journal articles
I am a PhD student who just tried multiple similar apps for the first time and I feel like “Listening” is the best for my purpose and would significantly improve my workflow. Unlike Speechify, Listening allows me to bookmark sentences with one click for future references while listening. This is essential cause I listen to articles while working out and cooking to save time — It is inconvenient if I have to pause audio and take highlights/notes using separate apps, or if I have to sit down later and go back through the article to re-find what sounded useful for me. Also, Listening takes time to render pdfs in the beginning, which actually leads to cleaner audio outputs that don’t include random marginal watermarks from journals that repeat after every page with Speechify. For the Listening team tho: I wanted to compare reddit reviews of various apps that do similar things and it was hard to locate posts about “Listening” because your name is really generic. I ended up just trying multiple apps and I do like this one. Hope you stay in business cause the subscription is yearly lolShow lessrobin28syp
Enjoying it so far!
I have been looking for an app like this for a while! Often, I’m traveling or on the go and it is difficult to get all the reading for my doctoral program completed. This helps a great deal! It is easy to upload and start right away. The notes feature is helpful but a little clunky getting back to the document itself, especially if you’re trying to read along. I end up having to pause when I do the notes so that I don’t miss what is next— especially since I listen at slightly higher speeds.Show lessPerpetual Student319
Still in Alpha testing
I uploaded 4 different pdfs, all academic papers. Entire sections were missing and I couldn’t make any sense of it. The voices sounds good but they haven’t been trained well enough to pronounce everyday science words yet and it makes the listening too far on the lumpy side of awkward. The apps seems like it’s still in alpha testing range, but I imagine it’ll get there soon. I wish it had a user-teach function, where a user could teach it the correct pronunciation (free development). I just deleted it because it wasn’t working well enough to even scrape through the papers I was trying to listen to.Show lessrebagyzmo
In a nutshell, it’s useless.
Don’t waste your time and money on this. Poorly designed UX. Slow and not efficient! Of 72 minutes of voiceover 2 minutes was on abstract and 70 minutes on references!!!!Karim 11111
Needs refinement
I thought this would be a great way to listen to papers, especially since it advertised being able to pronounce technical terms correctly. Unfortunately, it’s not there yet. For reference, I’m working in neurology and neuroscience. Thought I’d start it on some easy review articles from the most popular journals in the field (Nature journals, JAMA, and Neurology were the journals in this case). Gets about 30% of medical terms correct, less with mol. bio, genes, neuroscience specific terms. Often misinterpreted lines of justified text as individual letters, which is difficult to understand and makes flow very difficult. Is unable to read a word when it is hyphenated across two lines. I thought starting with massive journals with consistent formatting would be easiest, but it still struggled. And, as a reminder, these were topical review articles - terms overall were not particularly niche nor difficult. Overall, the idea is good, and I think it will improve with time, but right now it’s not worth the cost.Show lessHendrikJG
The phone app is nice but the webpage, not so much
What is great about this app is that I can use it on my phone or computer. However, notes that I took on my phone don’t appear when I am using a webpage. Further, I CANNOT EXPORT MY NOTES FROM ANY BROWSER - not edge, not chrome, not firefox. Now it is time for me to return to my notes for an essay, and I can’t export my notes!
I am incredibly frustrated with this app. I have sent multiple emails to the support team and have not received any response.Show lessitsyanita
Great when it works, but only works about 30% of the time
Giving this 2 stars because of the great potential, but in its current state, it’s extremely buggy, and only really works about a third of the time. You often have to load, delete, then reload papers onto the app and sometimes then it still doesn’t work. All that to say, the few times I’ve Gotten it to work have been great. It’s an expensive app, but if it worked as advertised it would absolutely be worth that price point. But in its current form, I would caution people against paying for it. Grateful for the free trial though.Show lessAdam K Amberg
Wanted this to work so bad
I am a grad student and really, really wanted this to work. I held on to the subscription for a few months longer than I should have because I hoped for some serious improvements, but those never came. I cannot recommend this app and have instead taken to telling fellow academics to avoid it.
Text readers and academic articles never mix well and unfortunately this app is no different. It is nice in concept - a reader app specifically oriented around academic articles that organizes by header sections and does not read the citations or header/footer information. I loved the idea of the text being available in the app to follow along with. However, in practice this app is a mess. The headers often do not correspond to the headers in the article (often many extra headers with no information below them, or headers that are just parts of a sentence). The text does not match the articles chronologically- often accidentally creating new and weird sentences or rearranging the text by reading across two columns or skipping sections. This is a huge issue because at times the authors’ intentions would be contradicted or made confusing by the app’s improper reading of the material. If the listener is not aware of this issue, they may end up mistaking the article entirely.Show lessAdSickened
PDF conversion did not work well
It kept missing words and breaking words into parts-2475-
A work in progress, not a product yet-cannot deliver for academic purposes
This is an interesting idea. The speed and potentials are great and it could provide great help to academics.
However, this is not a final product and it seems to have been rushed into the market. So when it demands pay, it is in effect asking us, the users, to fund the product development. This would have been somewhat acceptable if the product had the bare minimums required for an academic audio app, namely,
1- cross platform or at least cross device sync (the former is non existent and I think the same goes for the latter)
2- export capabilities that make sense for academics (lacking). At the moment it seems out notes marked as notes, without any reference to context. You can see the context on the app in terms of the name of the reference and the paragraph. This is already poor for academic work and adds to rather than reducing the workflow for academic note taking. But upon export, even that already poor contextual info (reference to text location) is lost.
3- reading is glitchy. In many instances it misreads simple words and expressions, let alone more complex, less familiar terms etc.
With these shortcomings, the app, in my opinion, is underdeveloped even as a prototype and therefore financialising it is premature.Show lessgozablinski
