Text-to-Voice PDF Reader Apps: I'm About to Change Your Life

There's nothing I enjoy more during a work day than popping on an audiobook or podcast before getting to work. Oddly enough, I feel like they help me get into a sense of flow and be more productive. I know it sounds a bit counterintuitive because generally people do not do well with multi-tasking, but if I am doing a task that I have done a thousand times before they make it more tolerable. For almost all of my graduate program, I had been wishing that there was some way to convert the research articles that we have to read each week for our classes into podcasts because let's be real, it's a drag when you've just worked an 8+ hour day and still have schoolwork to do at the end of it. As passionate as I may be about the field of instructional design, I am passionate about enjoying my personal time just as much.

Using Twitter for EME6414 has actually been a bit of a God send, especially recently. Not only does it connect me to others within the field and the relatable tweets they write, it also introduces me to new concepts, ideas, products, etc. that I wasn't aware existed before. One of these was text-to-voice PDF reader apps. As I was scrolling through my Twitter feed the other day, I came across this thread on them. I figured that they existed, but for some reason I had thought that they were only accessible to those with vision impairment. After a quick search within the App Store on my iPhone, it turns out there are many, many, many of them to choose from. Was I living under a rock? It just goes to show that millenials/Gen Z really are NOT digital natives. Anyway, now I have been getting caught up on some reading (listening, I guess I should say?) this weekend while going for walks and it has been incredibly enjoyable. I have been using Speechify and have had no hiccups with it thus far, though like I said before there are many available.

Are there any other technological life hacks you've discovered recently that have made your life easier? What were they?

"podcast listen" by Terry Freedman is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Comments

  1. LeahJuly 14, 2020 at 12:43 PM

    Thanks for sharing! I, too, find difficulty sitting down after an 8 hour work day and reading through articles. It'd be nice to pop in some headphones and listen while I cook dinner or walk my dogs. I'll have to check these resources.

    ReplyDelete

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