“Listen”: Audio for journal articles is here!

I was looking at a new article and noticed an icon I had never seen before. 

“Listen.”

I’m a sucker for new things, so I clicked. And I am... quite impressed.

The audio is being read by a machine, not a person, but the tone is not horribly mechanical. There are subtle things like emphasis on emphasizing words like “widespread.” It says “For example” when the actual text reads, “e.g.”

By default, the program automatically scrolls through the text and highlights what it is reading. You can turn it off, though. As you can see, you can adjust the volume and reading speed. But once you adjust the speed, it goes back to the start of the article, which is frustrating.

The experience is not seamless. In this article, it skipped over the authors – but it read the tabs at the top (“Full Article (pause) Figures and data (pause) References (pause) Citations,” and so on). 

Another frustrating element of the experience is that the software says “parenthesis” and “end parenthesis.”  Worse, it does it completely inconsistently. It sometimes mentions the opening parenthesis but not the closing, or vice versa. And sometimes it passes over parentheses without comment.

The program continues to reads all the references. Including DOI hyperlinks. (“H, T, T, P, S, divided by, divided by...”) This is terrible to listen to and nearly useless, in my view.

Not as good as a person reading the text, but not bad. Not bad at all.

The dropdown menu reveals one more key feature:

You can download an mp3 of the audio file. Which means you can put it on your phone or other audio device to listen while you’re walking the dog, working out at the gym, or commuting.

The idea of being able to listen to journal articles like audiobooks has been floated on Twitter multiple times, so I will be curious to see how this is received.

This is a good – possibly great – addition to journals. It increases the accessibility of the literature to people with vision problems. It increases the portability of papers, making them more like podcasts.

Kudos to Taylor and Francis. Hopefully, other publishers will roll out this soon.

Here is an open access article that you can use to try the feature. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15563650.2022.2105710

Update, 12 August 2022: The “Listen” feature is not on every Taylor and Francis article. This article on citation bias appears not to have it, even though it was published within the last week. But maybe that it because it is an authors’ preprint and not the final version of record.

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