Dictator
About the app →
Dictator reads text in natural voices without a character counter — and the same app works the other way round: it turns your speech into text, captions video and translates what it hears.
| Speechify | Dictator | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Limited free plan; Premium about $139 a year (or $29 a month) | Free for reading aloud; paid plans cover other cloud features |
| Natural voices | Premium feature, wide catalogue | 322 voices in 75 languages, included |
| Offline reading | Limited | System voices only — the natural ones are synthesised online |
| Speech to text | Separate product | Built in, runs locally, no minute limits |
| Live subtitles with translation | No | Yes, free and unlimited |
| Reading PDFs and scans | Yes, a core feature | Text and documents in docx, xlsx, pptx, txt — PDF is not supported |
| Platforms | Web, iOS, Android, Chrome, macOS | Windows, macOS, Android |
Speechify prices checked on 11 August 2026.
Speechify is built around reading: it opens PDFs and scanned books, follows the text with a highlight, speeds up to several hundred words a minute and syncs progress between phone and laptop. If your task is «listen to documents», it is the stronger tool — we do not open PDFs at all.
Not on the free voices. Premium AI voices are metered, because a server synthesises them.
75 languages have natural voices; system voices add whatever is installed in your operating system.
Reading aloud happens in the app; there is no export of the audio file.
And dictate back in the same app.
See reading aloudPublished · updated