Alex Kolchinski

Today, I’m announcing the public launch of the ReadToMe app, which turns paper books and other printed text into high-quality audio.

I originally built the app as a present to my fiancée, who has a reading disability but loves books. Often, she listens to audiobooks while following along in the same book on paper, but some books, especially older and less popular ones, are only available in paper form and don’t come in audiobook or even e-book form.

We looked for a way for her to turn paper books into audio, but all of the apps we found didn’t do a very good job. Many of them were very good at turning e-books and other digital text into high-quality audio, but made many mistakes when scanning paper books. Common issues included inserting page numbers and footnotes into the middle of sentences and getting words wrong or missing them completely. Overall, there ended up being so many mistakes that the books were very hard to listen to — and that was for the better apps.

As a Christmas present, I wrote an early version of ReadToMe for my fiancée. When she found it useful, and I had spare time on my hands while shutting down my last company, I built out the app into its current version — which is what you see here.

The app lets you scan up to 20 pages at a time and turns them into high-quality audio, with very few mistakes. The app costs $9.99/month for up to 250 pages/month — sorry it can’t be free; I estimate the $9.99/month will cover the costs of the pretty expensive AI technology it uses on the back end.

Known issues that I’ll be working on fixing if enough people end up using the app include:

• Scans can take a few minutes to come back as audio, especially when scanning multiple pages at once.
• Rarely, scans will fail to come back as audio at all and have to be retried.
• The AI I’m using on the back end will sometimes “correct” the wording of a book, especially when an author deliberately uses incorrect grammar.

I expect the app might be useful for a couple of types of user, including:

• People with reading disabilities or just age-related far-sightedness that makes reading hard.
• People who want to seamlessly bounce between reading something on paper and listening to a few pages, e.g. while driving.

I’m also looking forward to seeing who else might find it useful.

If that’s you, or you know someone who might find ReadToMe useful, please give it a try and/or let them know! And I’d appreciate any feedback on things that the app does well or poorly — you can reach me at alex@yaksoft.net