Liso vs Speechify: Which One Should You Actually Use?
7 min read
Full disclosure before anything else: we make Liso. You should weigh everything below with that in mind. What follows is a genuine attempt at the comparison, including the cases where Speechify is the better purchase, because sending you to the wrong tool wastes your money and gets us a refund request.
If you would rather read a comparison where we have no stake at all, we also wrote the best Speechify alternatives and Speechify vs NaturalReader.
The short answer
Buy Speechify if your reading is documents. PDFs, textbooks, Word files, scanned pages, course readings. It is a full study suite with native mobile apps and it does that job well.
Use Liso if your reading is the web. Articles, newsletters, long posts, docs shared with you, research you found in a browser tab. Liso turns anything you highlight into a saved audio library and does nothing else.
Those are genuinely different products that happen to both convert text into speech. Most of the frustration people report with either one comes from buying the one built for the other job.
What Speechify actually is
Speechify started as a reading tool for dyslexia and grew into a broad platform. Today it covers a browser extension, iOS and Android apps, document import, a camera scanner for physical pages, a large voice library including celebrity voices, and a separate product line for AI voiceover.
That breadth is the whole pitch. If you are a student with a stack of PDFs, a physical textbook, and a commute, Speechify has a feature aimed at each of those. It is also the most heavily marketed product in the category, which is why it is usually the first name people encounter.
The tradeoffs are the ones any broad product has. There is more interface to learn, the best voices sit on the higher tier, and it is one of the pricier options in the category once you get there.
What Liso actually is
Liso does one thing: it turns text you highlight on the web into natural audio in a library you own.
Install the Chrome extension, highlight anything on any page, right click, and choose Listen with Liso. A few seconds later it is in your library as a proper audio item you can play, speed up, file into a folder, annotate, and download.
The important part is what happens after the audio exists. Every listen is saved with its transcript, so you can read along or scan back to a line you want to quote. You can attach notes, tag things, sort them into folders so work reading and personal reading stay separate, and share a listen with someone by link. Your position follows you between devices, so starting on a laptop and finishing on a phone works without thinking about it.
What Liso does not do: there is no PDF or document upload, no camera scanner, no native iPhone or Android app, and no celebrity voices. If those matter to you, this is the paragraph that should decide it.
Where they genuinely overlap
Both read web pages aloud with natural AI voices. Both have adjustable playback speed. Both let you listen offline. Both have a free tier that is enough to find out whether listening suits you.
Voice quality is close enough in normal listening that we would not tell you to pick on that basis. Speechify has a larger catalogue of voices. Liso has fewer and they are good. Neither is going to be the reason you abandon the habit.
Where they genuinely differ
### Getting text in
Speechify wants you to bring it a document, or point its extension at a page, or scan a page with your camera. Liso wants you to highlight the part you care about.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. Most web pages are 30 percent article and 70 percent navigation, related links, cookie banners, and comment sections. Highlighting first means you never listen to the navigation.
### What you end up with
With Speechify you have opened a document and pressed play. With Liso you have created an item. Those feel the same in the moment and diverge over weeks. After a month of Liso you have a library of everything you meant to read, which is closer to a personal podcast feed than a reader.
If you want the longer version of that argument, see how to listen to articles instead of reading them.
### Mobile
Speechify wins here without argument. Native apps on both platforms, offline sync, a scanner, a widget.
Liso is a web app on the phone. Listens made on your laptop are already there when you open it, and playback and downloads work, but it is a browser tab and not an app icon. If your listening is mostly on a phone, weigh that heavily.
### Price
Liso is free for five listens a month with no card. Paid is $17 a month, or $14.67 a month billed every six months, or $8.92 a month billed yearly.
Speechify has a free tier and a premium tier, and the premium tier is where the better voices live. It is generally priced above Liso, and it runs promotions often enough that quoting a number here would be wrong within a month. Check the current page before you decide, and look carefully at whether a monthly price is actually an annual charge.
Side by side
| | Liso | Speechify | | --- | --- | --- | | Best for | Web articles and newsletters | Documents and study | | Highlight to audio | Yes, one right click | Extension reads the page | | PDF and document upload | No | Yes | | Camera scanning | No | Yes | | Saved audio library | Yes, core to the product | Secondary | | Transcript with each listen | Yes | Partial | | Notes, tags, folders | Yes | Limited | | Share a listen by link | Yes | No | | Native mobile app | No, web app | Yes, iOS and Android | | Offline downloads | Yes | Yes | | Free tier | 5 listens a month, no card | Yes, limited voices | | Entry paid price | $17 a month, less on longer terms | Higher, varies with promotions |
Three people, three answers
The student with a reading list of PDFs. Speechify. This is not close. Liso has no document upload and would have you copying text out of a PDF by hand, which nobody sustains past week two. Our own guide to listening to a PDF points elsewhere for the same reason.
The person with 60 open tabs and a newsletter backlog. Liso. The whole product is built for the specific failure mode where you save things sincerely and never return to them. Highlight, right click, and it is waiting as audio on your commute.
The person who mostly listens on a phone. Speechify, unless you are happy creating listens at a desk and consuming them on the phone through a browser. That split actually works well and is how a lot of people use Liso, but it is a workflow and not an app, and you should know that before paying.
Questions people ask
Can I use both? Yes, and some people do. Speechify for coursework and documents, Liso for the web reading backlog. Two free tiers cost nothing to test.
Is Liso a Speechify clone? No. It is deliberately much narrower. We did not build document import or a scanner, and there is no roadmap promise here that we will.
Which has better voices? Speechify has more of them. In ordinary listening at 1.5x speed, most people cannot pick a winner. Do not let this be your deciding factor.
Does Liso work outside Chrome? The web app works in any modern browser. The one click highlight capture is a Chrome extension, so on other browsers you paste the text instead.
Where Liso fits
If your problem is that you save far more to read than you ever read, that is the exact problem Liso was built for. Highlight, right click, listen, and the backlog starts clearing on walks and commutes instead of sitting in a bookmarks folder.
If your problem is a stack of PDFs and a textbook, buy Speechify. We would rather tell you that now.
Free to start, five listens a month, no card needed. Try it free.