Read articles aloud: turn any web page into audio

The workflow

Most long-form reading now happens in a browser tab: a saved article, a newsletter you opened later, a blog post someone sent you, documentation you're working through. The fastest way to turn any of it into audio is to skip converting it into anything at all — just select the text where it already sits and trigger Shmia.

Click and drag to select the article's body text (or use Select All if you want the whole page), then either click the small play bubble that pops up next to your selection, or press Option+Command+R on Mac or Ctrl+Alt+R on Windows. Shmia starts speaking in about a second — it streams the first sentences immediately while it keeps generating the rest of the article in the background, so a 15-paragraph piece starts just as fast as a short one.

A small floating player stays on top of your browser window with a live timeline and play/pause, so you can pause mid-paragraph to reply to a message and pick up exactly where you left off, without it ever stealing keyboard focus from what you're doing.

Why this beats copying into a separate reader app

Plenty of text-to-speech tools require you to copy the article's text and paste it into their own app, or paste in a link and wait for their system to fetch and process the page before anything plays. Both add friction: you're leaving the page, losing your place, and often stripping out formatting or images you might still want to glance at. Shmia skips all of that — it reads the selection right where it is, in whatever browser or newsletter client you're already using, so the article stays open exactly as you found it.

That also means it works identically across sources. A Substack newsletter, a news site, a Medium post, internal documentation at work, a long Reddit thread — anywhere you can select text in a browser, the same shortcut or bubble works the same way. There's nothing to configure per site.

Speed control for skimming (or slowing down)

Not every article deserves the same pace. Shmia's floating player includes a speed control from 0.75x up to 2x that applies instantly, even mid-sentence, without the pitch-shifted "chipmunk" effect that makes sped-up speech hard to follow. Push it toward 1.5–2x to blow through a long piece you mostly want the gist of, or drop it to 0.75x for something denser — like a technical explainer or a piece with unfamiliar names and terms — where you actually want every sentence to land.

Hands-free reading, for real

The practical reason people reach for this in the first place is usually that their hands and eyes are busy elsewhere. Once an article is playing in Shmia's floating player, you can put your phone down, step away from the screen, and keep listening while doing chores, exercising, cooking, or commuting — the audio keeps going, and the player is right there with play/pause and the timeline whenever you come back to check on it. It's the difference between "I'll read that later" (and never getting to it) and actually getting through your reading list during time you'd otherwise spend doing nothing else productive.

All of this runs on Shmia's free tier — 10 on-device voices, unlimited listening, no credit card. If you want more natural-sounding narration for articles you listen to a lot, the optional Premium and Ultra tiers add 8 human-sounding ElevenLabs voices for a set number of hours each month, and playback quietly continues on the free voices if you use up those hours before the month resets.