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How Speechify is evolving into a hands-free AI assistant

March 3, 2026

DEVELOPER STORIES

Three iPhone screenshots from the app Speechify, all showing UI of how the app reads printed text aloud. The screenshots are all against a dark black and purple background.

GUIDED BY VOICES

With features like voice AI chat, text-to-speech, and voice typing, Speechify aims to be a full-time AI assistant — one that doesn’t require a keyboard at all.

By taking advantage of an array of machine learning tools and features, the 2025 Apple Design Award winner in the Inclusivity category serves as an AI-powered voice assistant for work, education, and entertainment.

“Our mission is to build the voice AI assistant that helps you achieve your full potential across every part of your work or education,” says founder Cliff Weitzman.

With Speechify, people can interact with a variety of file formats — including PDFs, epub files, and web pages — and convert the text to audio that can easily be sped up, slowed down, and played across different devices. Built with SwiftUI, the app offers more than 1,000 voices in 60 languages, all powered by the team’s proprietary SIMBA text-to-speech model, which uses Core ML to integrate with devices. That strategy allows people to access languages locally — and the company to operate more efficiently. “Apple chips helped us reduce costs dramatically,” says CFO Pankaj Agarwal.

Speechify

  • Available on: iPhone, iPad
  • Team size: 200
  • Based in: Miami
  • Awards: Apple Design Award winner for Inclusivity (2025)

Learn more about Speechify >

Download Speechify from the App Store >

Elsewhere, Speechify uses Metal (for flattening scanned pages to read aloud), SwiftData, and Swift 6 with structured concurrency. And by taking advantage of App Intents, the app lets people import text and URLs, search with Spotlight, resume playback, browse their library, and more.

“Voice AI can make people ten times more productive in work and education,” says Tyler Weitzman, Cliff’s brother and company president. “We want Speechify to become the voice AI assistant and voice operating system of choice for people around the world.”

A photo of Speechify founder Cliff Weitzman, who is wearing a blue hoodie and standing against a gray wall.

“Our mission is to build the voice AI assistant that helps you achieve your full potential across every part of your work or education,” says founder Cliff Weitzman.

The creators of Speechify set out not to be pioneers in the field of machine learning, but to help themselves navigate their own difficulties. In 2017, Cliff was a college student trying to overcome his own learning struggles; he was diagnosed with dyslexia in third grade and later learned he had ADHD. “But I knew that to be who I wanted to be I had to be able to read,” he noted. “So I walked around everywhere with a book under my arm, and imagined that one day I’d be able to read it.”

As he got older, Cliff found that he absorbed information best by hearing it. By the time he got to Brown University, he was using text-to-speech programs on his iPhone to navigate reading assignments — a strategy that inspired the first version of Speechify. The app’s on-device AI speech model was built by Tyler, who is blind in his left eye and uses the app to navigate his own reading challenges. Now, less than a decade later, the app has been downloaded by more than 50 million people.

Weitzman spent the early days of the app’s development doing plenty of listening himself. “The first versions actually had a ‘Send the team a message’ button that opened up my personal iMessage, so users could directly chat me,” Weitzman recalls. “Whenever they faced a bug or had feedback, I heard about it right away. Eventually, I got so many iMessages, I needed to ask someone to reset my account.”

A series of four Speechify screenshots on iPhone, showing various parts of the the app’s ability to help people record and create podcasts.

Speechify’s new offerings include an AI-powered feature that creates a custom podcast from any prompt or document.

While students made up a substantial portion of Speechify’s early user base, today the team sees the app embraced outside of the classroom, whether by pressed-for-time single parents, busy business executives, or police officers and firefighters who need to learn on the go.

They’ve all turned to Speechify to simplify the way they work and learn — much like Weitzman did when he began experimenting with text-to-speech technology as a young student.

“We will not stop,” he says, “until we serve the billions of people around the world who need Speechify as they get through school, work, and their everyday lives.”