Free PDF to audio converter
PDF to Speech
Speech studio
34 voices · 18 languages
Turn a PDF into natural speech you can listen to anywhere. Choose the file and the pages, pick a voice, and download one MP3 — for a report on your commute, a paper you need to get through, or a chapter you would rather hear than read. The PDF is read in your browser and never uploaded.
How it works
Three steps, about a minute
- 1
Choose a PDF
Pick a file or drop it on the box. The text is pulled out in your browser; the PDF itself never leaves your device.
- 2
Pick the pages and a voice
Set a page range, then choose a voice in the generator. Want to cut page numbers or references first? Edit the text before converting.
- 3
Listen and download
Long selections are split into parts and joined back into one MP3 or WAV file you can download.
Examples
Hear the voices on document-style text
Every clip below was generated here on the free tier — no account, no credits. Play one to hear the voice on that kind of writing, or load the script into the generator and make your own version of it.
Audiobook passage
Narrative prose, to hear how a voice handles description and pace.
“The house had been empty for eleven years, and it had the particular stillness of a place that has stopped expecting anyone. Dust lay on the banister in a way that suggested nobody had run a hand along it in a very long time. She did, once, on the way up, and felt slightly guilty about it.”
Course lesson
Module opener that tells learners what they will be able to do.
“By the end of this lesson you'll be able to read a balance sheet and say, in one sentence, whether the company can pay its bills next month. We'll use one real example throughout, and you'll do the last one yourself before we check it together.”
Lesson recap
Closes a module by naming the three things worth remembering.
“Three things to take with you. Assets minus liabilities is equity, and that relationship never breaks. Profit is an opinion; cash is a fact. And a company can be profitable and still run out of money — which is what the next lesson is entirely about.”
Included
What you get
- Your PDF stays on your device
- Text extraction runs in your browser. Only the text you choose to convert is sent to the voice engine — the same as typing it.
- Choose the pages
- Convert a chapter, a section or the whole document. The character count and listening time update as you change the range.
- One file, however long
- A selection of up to 50,000 characters — just under an hour of audio — comes back as one MP3 or WAV, not a folder of fragments.
- Natural free voices
- Free voices in 7 languages, at adjustable speed. Pick one that matches the language of your PDF.
- Edit before you convert
- Remove headers, footnotes or a reference list in the text box before generating, so the audio carries only what you want to hear.
- Free to start
- 5,000 characters a day without an account, 10,000 with a free one. No card needed.
How PDF to speech works here
When you choose a file, your browser opens it with pdf.js — the open-source PDF engine Firefox uses — and reads out the text of each page. Nothing is uploaded at that point, and nothing is uploaded at all if you close the tab. The page range you pick becomes plain text in the generator, exactly as if you had pasted it there.
From there it is ordinary text to speech. The generator splits long text at sentence boundaries, voices each part with the same voice and settings, and joins the parts back into a single MP3 or WAV in your browser, so a 40-minute report downloads as one file.
What converts well — and what doesn’t
PDFs made from a document — reports, articles, papers, ebooks, contracts — convert well, because their text is real text. Scanned PDFs do not: each page is a photo of text, with nothing to read out. If a file says it has no selectable text, run it through an OCR tool first and open the result here.
Everything that is text on the page is read, in order. That includes running headers, page numbers, footnote markers and the reference list, and tables come out row by row. Two-column layouts are usually read column by column, but not always. When a PDF has a lot of this, use “Edit the text first”, delete what you do not want to hear, then generate.
How much of a PDF is free?
Every visitor gets 5,000 characters a day free, and a free account doubles that to 10,000. With an account, a longer selection continues past the free allowance on credits — one credit per 1,000 characters on the Kokoro voices, such as Bella, Emma and Adam — and the generator shows the exact number before anything is spent. Credits are a one-time purchase and never expire.
| Allowance | Characters | Listening time |
|---|---|---|
| Free, no account | 5,000 a day | about 5 minutes |
| Free account | 10,000 a day | about 10 minutes |
| One conversion run | up to 50,000 | just under an hour |
| Mini credit pack, $4.90 | 200,000 extra | about 3½ hours |
Choosing a voice for long listening
For documents, a calm narrator wears best over an hour: Bella reads warm, natural narration at about 170 words per minute, Emma is a calm British voice, and Adam is clearer and quicker. Listening to a report you mostly want to skim, set the speed to 1.25× — many listeners find it comfortable, and it cuts an hour to 48 minutes.
Match the voice to the language of the PDF. Free voices cover 7 languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi and Japanese; an English voice reading a French document will mispronounce almost every word.
Your PDF stays private
The file is opened and read inside your browser tab and is never sent to our servers. The only thing that leaves your device is the text you choose to convert, which goes to the voice engine to be spoken — the same path as text typed into the generator. Close the tab before converting and nothing was transmitted at all.
Questions
Frequently asked
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