Listening to PDFs is now much better

Hi! Evan here, the developer behind Listenly.

Today I want to share a very important update.

It probably makes Listenly the best software out there for listening to PDFs.

Here’s a quick video demo:

How it works

I had to share it with someone for sanity’s sake…

First, I changed the underlying tool used to extract textual content from PDF.

Previous tools that I used weren’t able to read the multi-column layouts properly, and sometimes were skipping whole chunks of the document. It was no good.

New software that is under the hood is very reliable; I’ve been testing it with various PDF books, articles, scientific papers — and haven’t found any errors so far.

Second, I’m now using LLMs to process full PDF text and clean it from all the footnotes, headers, links, navigational items and other stuff that you actually don’t want to listen to.

I have tested several LLMs, iterated over the prompt a lot, had to split the full text into smaller chunks to make it fit into the LLM’s context, but the result is definitely worth it. I really haven’t seen anything like it in all the other “read-aloud” solutions.

I invite you to test it out! If you ever wanted to listen to a PDF instead of reading it, I believe you will be very surprised at how smoothly it works now.

Discount!

Use promo code `PDF` on the checkout for a 30% discount for every plan during the next 2 weeks (until Sep 7).

I hope you will enjoy it as I do.

Up next: Listen from the Podcasts app

I’m now working on a Podcast RSS feed generation so you can listen to your stuff from any podcast app on desktop and mobile devices. Many people asked for it, and it will be release very soon 🙂

Have a great day!

Peace.