Text to speech for studying: turn your notes into audio

Quick ways to listen to your notes

Listening is a second pass, not a replacement: combine it with recalling the answers yourself.

• Word, Google Docs and Microsoft Edge have read-aloud features for documents, web pages and PDFs.
• On an iPhone, Speak Screen reads the open page when you swipe down with two fingers from the top.
• On Android, Select to Speak reads what you tap on the screen.
• These are fine for a quick pass; for material you replay many times, a recording in a natural voice is easier on the ears.

Definitions and flashcards free online

Paste a definition or a key sentence of 30 to 100 characters into the page of any voice, choose the language and press Voice it. In a few seconds you can listen and download the recording, with no account. One recording per term is a simple audio flashcard.

Write notes for the ear

Start each topic with its title so you know where you are when you skip around the recording.

• Spell out formulas: x squared rather than x², and the square root of two rather than √2.
• Write large numbers without a thousands separator, 1250 rather than 1,250, and spell out % and other signs: the engine skips them.
• Expand abbreviations you would not say aloud, such as e.g. or approx.
• Use short sentences and one idea per line: notes written for the ear are easier to remember.

Whole notes as MP3, faster or slower

For a whole set of notes, install the free engine with python -m pip install superclonica-cpu and run superclonica --text-file notes.txt --voice F2 --lang en --speed 1.2 --normalize --output notes.mp3. --speed 1.2 makes the voice faster for review, and a value below 1 slows it down for hard material. The engine has no character limit and runs offline, so lecture notes and summaries never leave your computer. One file per topic makes revision easy to plan.

Flashcards with sound in Anki

Anki can play audio on cards: write terms and definitions as term;definition lines in cards.csv and run python -c "import csv; from superclonica import Superclonica; tts = Superclonica(); [tts.save(row[0] + '.mp3', tts.synthesize(row[0] + '. ' + row[1], 'F2', 'en')[0]) for row in csv.reader(open('cards.csv', encoding='utf-8'), delimiter=';')]". It saves one MP3 per term; copy the files into Anki’s media folder and add [sound:term.mp3] to a card field, for example [sound:photosynthesis.mp3]. The voice reads exactly what you wrote, so check your notes for mistakes first.