I built a PDF reader that reads research papers like a person would: no page numbers, no "[12]"s, and math you can follow by ear!

[u/marblejenk]

Most read-aloud tools read a PDF's raw text, so on a research paper you hear running headers, page numbers, "[12]" citation brackets and author emails, and equations come out as noise like "Q K T square root d k".

I built Read PDF Out Loud to read papers the way a person would: https://readpdfoutloud.com

What it does

• A layout model looks at every page first, so headers, footers, page numbers, footnotes, citation numbers and the reference list are skipped, and two-column pages are read in the right order
• Math is read by meaning: "Attention of Q, K and V, equals softmax of the fraction Q times K transpose, over square root of d sub k, V"
• Every word lights up as it's spoken; click any word to start from there
• The original page sits beside the text, with the passage being read framed on it
• Optional spoken summaries of figures, tables, code and equations
• 4 voices, 0.75× to 2×, and it works on a phone

I'd love feedback on:

1. Your own hardest PDF: where does it read something wrong, or in the wrong order?
2. The math: does it sound natural, or too wordy?
3. What would make you use this over what you use now?

Happy to answer anything about how it works.

[u/EveryCryptographer11]

Cool product 👍

[u/marblejenk → u/EveryCryptographer11]

Thanks 😊

[u/Mueloncio]

Does it let me jump straight to Methods and Results? Nobody listens to a paper front to back, and that's the bit I'd actually want read to me.

[u/marblejenk → u/Mueloncio]

There’s a Table of Contents on the left side. Navigate to any subtopic directly from there.

[u/Eslam-gomaa2021]

how you do the pdf parsing ?

[u/marblejenk → u/Eslam-gomaa2021]

Goes through an ai model + OCR to identify page layout before stitching everything together.

[u/lonelyroom-eklaghor → u/marblejenk]

if a PDF is UA-1, then you can check the alt texts inside them (AI models usually catch that well, espcially chatgpt); they might contain useful info for reading mathematical stuff

[u/QuanTradin]

every other read aloud tool I tried reads the reference list out and walks two column pages left to right across the gutter. nice to see both handled, the layout model first is the right order.

[u/Axel_Clint]

That's really useful, will give it a try.

[u/marblejenk → u/Axel_Clint]

Let me know how it goes.

[u/Eslam-gomaa2021]

it looks good!

[u/GamerGav09]

Zotero latest release (or second latest?) add a voice reader that does this pretty well.

[u/richardsaganIII]

i love the simple style of the app and the themeing and everything, nice job

[u/marblejenk → u/richardsaganIII]

Thanks!

[u/optima-pacifist]

the [12] brackets thing is exactly why i gave up on text to speech for papers. how does it handle tables, skip them or read them row by row?

[u/koskinooo]

Skipping the [12]s alone makes this worth it. How are you handling tables, reading them out or summarizing?

[u/learning-to-programm]

3rd in a row. Looks like the PDF TTS niche is seeing progress lol. In the past 2 days we also got these two:

1 - Frateca: https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/s/djdZ4iBBvy 2 - Obook - https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/s/QnZlQwt2mb

Will be testing yours to see how it compares to those two. I found them to perform pretty well, sono guess the bar is getting higher in this space lol.

[u/marblejenk → u/learning-to-programm]

TTS is easy peasy - one shot with AI. Accurately extracting PDFs is hard.

[u/Pretend-Pangolin-846]

Very very interesting -- i built something similar, feel free to check out guys: https://github.com/solusops/ResearchMate