Start it
Open an article and pressP. Or click Listen in the byline under the
title, use the reader toolbar, the mobile bottom bar, or the command palette.
Shift+P closes the player. In your feeds, right-click an entry and choose
Play audio to start without opening it.
Playback is app-wide. Navigate to another page, dig around your library, open a
second article — the audio keeps going, and the player stays with you.
Listen does not appear on YouTube pages, podcast episodes, or uploaded files
other than books. Those are the three exclusions.
Choose a voice
Ten voices ship. Two of them are free.
Locked voices stay visible rather than being hidden, so you can see what a
paid plan adds. Picking one on a free account returns an upgrade prompt
instead of audio.
The underlying speech engine is picked by the language of the article, not
by your plan. English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, and Dutch go
one way; every other language goes the other. A free voice in Spanish is the
same quality decision as a paid voice in Spanish.
Drive it
As it reads, the current word is highlighted in the article text. Be aware that
those timings are interpolated, not measured — the speech service returns
audio, not a word-by-word transcript with timestamps, so smry spreads the words
across the audio proportionally. On evenly paced prose it tracks well. Through
a long pause, a list, or a quoted block, the highlight can drift ahead of the
voice for a sentence or two.
The same article, twice
Audio is cached for 30 days, keyed to the exact text, the voice, and the language. Replay an article and it starts immediately instead of being synthesized again. Your browser also keeps the chunks it has already played, so scrubbing backwards costs nothing. Listening again to the same article in the same voice on the same day does not spend another listen. A different voice is a different piece of audio, so it does.How much you get
You do not need an account for your one free listen a day — it is tracked by
network address. Signing up is what gets you a library and history; a paid plan
is what lifts the ceiling.
Above 20,000 cleaned characters, a free listen is declined before any audio
is made, with an upgrade prompt rather than a truncated reading. On every plan
there is a hard transport ceiling of 100,000 characters, roughly twenty minutes
of audio.
Your daily listen is charged when the first piece of audio actually reaches
you, not when you press the button. A session that fails to produce sound does
not cost you the day’s listen.
Questions
Why is Listen missing on this page?
Why is Listen missing on this page?
It is a YouTube page, a podcast episode, or a file you uploaded that is not
a book. Those three cannot be read aloud.
Why does the highlight fall behind the voice?
Why does the highlight fall behind the voice?
Word timings are estimated from the length of the audio, not reported by
the speech service. Long pauses and lists push it out of step. Clicking a
word still seeks to the right place.
Can I keep listening while I browse?
Can I keep listening while I browse?
Yes. The player is app-wide and survives navigation inside smry.
Does a replay use another listen?
Does a replay use another listen?
Not on the same day, in the same voice. Switching voices makes new audio
and counts again.
What happens if everyone starts listening at once?
What happens if everyone starts listening at once?
smry runs a fixed number of speech jobs at a time. Past that you get a
short “busy, try again” rather than a queue that never resolves.
Can my AI agent make audio?
Can my AI agent make audio?
No. Text-to-speech is a reader feature only. There is no listen operation
on the API or over MCP.
Next
In the reader
Typography, images, and the rest of the reading surface.
Ask about what you are reading
Chat and summaries for the article in front of you.
Read with an agent
Extraction and passage search over the API.