Speechify is an AI text-to-speech platform that converts documents, articles, PDFs, e-books, and web pages into natural-sounding audio. Founded in 2017 by Cliff Weitzman, who built the first version while studying with dyslexia at Brown University, the company has grown into one of the largest TTS products on the market with more than 20 million users across mobile, desktop, and browser extensions.
The core consumer product highlights text as it is read aloud, supports adjustable speeds up to 4.5x, and ships with hundreds of AI voices in 60+ languages, including celebrity-licensed voices and a Voice Cloning feature that lets users generate a personal voice model from a short sample. A separate product line, Speechify Studio, targets podcasters, video creators, and dubbing teams with longer-form generation, voice-over tools, and a commercial API priced from roughly $10 per million characters.
Speechify is widely adopted by learners with dyslexia, ADHD, and other reading differences, as well as professionals who prefer to listen to long reports, legal documents, and research papers. School and enterprise plans bundle classroom rosters, OCR for scanned material, and admin controls, while individual Premium plans (around $29/month or $139/year) unlock unlimited listening, advanced voices, and offline audio.
The company raised a $40M Series A and has remained relatively quiet on subsequent rounds, focusing instead on product breadth and an expanding voice marketplace. Competitors include ElevenLabs on the studio side and Audible on the consumption side, but Speechify's combination of a reader app, voice cloning, and developer API gives it a unique position across accessibility, productivity, and creator tooling.