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Great idea but too buggy
It’s a great idea in concept but the problems I’m consistently having are:
1) The app does not do a good job of splitting the file into chapters. Even when I upload a file that has chapter headings ‘chapter 1:… chapter 2:…’
2) About 5 minutes into listening I will consistently have the audio cut off and say that it is loading and shouldn’t take more than 2 minutes but I just have to close down the app after about 5 mins and try another day. This makes it impossible to listen to papers like a podcast which is the whole point.
If this app worked properly it would be a must have for students and academics.Show less*Nicole
Basically as bad as I suspected for STEM papers
Tried listening to an article. Pronunciation isn’t bad for normal words, but it struggles with units (like Hz). Equations are totally unusable and sometimes incorrect. Failed to correctly segment the paper into sections and came up with strange section names. I wanted this to work but gave up pretty quick.Show lessMatt Hollande
Great idea, needs a LOT of tuning
Writing this on December 19th, 2023. I was super excited about this app but after using it a few days I’ve determined it’s useless to me as is. It’s advertised as a scientific paper AI reader but it can’t even understand superscripts at the end of sentences as references - after every sentence with a superscript reference, it reads “to the power of… (etc)”. Honestly that’s my main complaint but if it can’t do that I don’t trust it for anything.
To give some context, I used it to read biology papers - the pronunciation is pretty good but occasionally it skips sections that I presume it doesn’t understand but it doesn’t tell you that it’s skipping something. It’s pretty good about knowing which sections are which (abstract etc) but again it’s not great at it. Also loading papers is difficult, I had to do it on the website and then listen on my phone once it syncs.
I hope they can continue to improve this app to a usable status in the future because the idea is great.Show lessnickname4242435
Too clunky
I like the idea, but having to send papers and waiting for them to process for 3 to 5 mins is quite clunky. Shame there’s not a web version as I’d like to read on a large screen as I listen.GFlyer42
Don’t spend money on it. It doesn’t work
This app doesn’t read PDFs properly. I’ve tried to read multiple documents with this service. Every document I read with this app has the first or last sentence of a page cut off on just about every page. On multiple occasions I’ve had paragraphs get rearranged. The most recent document I’ve tried to read the reader skipped a large amount of pages, making a big chunk of the text just disappear and not be read. On another pdf, halfway through the document the reader decided to put the last page in the middle for no rhyme or reason. If this is meant to help students read and learn, these glitches are not conducive to this mission statement. I don’t even really understand how you can make a computer/AI that can’t read things in the right order. That should be your first priority when you make something like this. Do NOT spend your money on a service that only half works. I feel like my time and money is wasted every time I try to use this. They need to do a massive improvements before they can expect people to pay them. Starting with delivering what they claim.Show lessyoulovetre
Good stuff
Pretty great. Good voice. Works way better than the iPhone or mac listening. It does skip around sometimes in the papers which can get frustrating if you're busy and can’t figure out the sentences you missed by looking at the actual paper. Also, I wish there was an option to leave the figures out or put them at the end. I love the note feature.Show lessNoel Palm
Buggy and takes too long
Nice idea, but not usable. Uploaded a preprint PDF to this. It took overnight to process it and when it was ready, the text was often corrupted. It seemed to have difficulty distinguishing letters (often in the middle of words) from numbers, which meant the audio was often impossible to follow.Idjtuiooottyi
Not quite there but huge potential.
I did a free trial and I think it’s just not quite there. It makes a lot of mistakes which makes it almost impossible to understand and follow properly. For example I tried one pdf and the spacing for the word of was too big for it and it read all of the work O. F instead of of. That interrupted the flow for me. Also if the pdf spacing was smaller it mashed up words so you would have like three words read as one. You end up focusing on those mistakes and then having to follow the text on screen to understand which doesn’t help at all because it defeats the purpose and you can’t concentrate on the content.Show lessLeonieLKU
Great at reading, bad at converting text
The AI voices are impressive in their ability to read fairly naturally with pauses, emphasis, and tone. However, I have found that when it scans in text, it sometimes will skip a line, especially at page breaks. It also sometimes splits up a sentence as if there was a paragraph break, causing a pause in the AI voice that can impede comprehension. In one case, the font of the PDF was readable but something caused it to frequently interpret a “y” at the end of a word as separate from the rest of the word. Finally, when uploading a large PDF it has to load the text in chunks for reading, and when loading the next chunk it consistently was skipping about a paragraph so I had to manually move it back to the top of the skipped text (on the other hand, it was 200 pages and I’m impressed it could handle that at all!). If the text scanning is improved this could be 5 stars.Show lessFrustrated ex-fan
Needs work
It’s not horrible….but it’s also not great. I wouldn’t even say it’s good, but it’s acceptable if you have really really good audio processing skills. It kind of butchers a lot of technical terms (I’m a biomedical engineer grad student) even some simpler ones like ‘hydrogel’. I commend the developers for the progress they’ve made, but I don’t think the App is worth the price they are charging.Show lessashen Phoenician
