By Sagar Shankaran, Founder of CallSphere
An honest review of the Speechify app in 2026. Features, pricing, alternatives, and where TTS apps fit alongside conversational AI voice agents.
Key takeaways
This is part of our Best Text To Speech App guide.
The Speechify app is a text-to-speech reader. You paste text, drop in a PDF, point it at a webpage, or scan a printed page with your phone, and it reads the content aloud in a natural-sounding voice. It runs on iOS, Android, Chrome, Mac, and Windows. The Speechify app's core value is letting you consume long-form text without reading visually.
I am Sagar Shankaran, founder of CallSphere. I get asked about Speechify often because both products use modern TTS, but the use cases are fundamentally different. Speechify is for personal consumption — you listening to text. CallSphere is for two-way voice conversations — your customers talking to your business. This post explains the difference and helps you pick.
If you are looking for an app that reads your email, your research papers, or your kid's textbook out loud, Speechify is a fine pick alongside competitors like NaturalReader, Voice Dream, ElevenLabs Reader, and Apple's built-in Speak Screen. If you are looking for a way to handle inbound customer calls or qualify outbound leads with AI, you need a voice agent platform, not a TTS reader.
Three things Speechify executes on:
The pricing tiers as of 2026 are typically a free tier with limited voice options and a Premium tier in the $11–$15/mo range. Premium unlocks high-quality voices, faster speed, and offline use. For students, professionals, and people with reading disabilities, the Premium tier is reasonable value.
What Speechify does not do: hold a conversation. The app reads text to you. It does not listen, understand, or respond. It does not call anyone. It does not book appointments or answer questions from your customers. Those are different products entirely.
The most common misuse I see: small business owners trying to use Speechify (or any TTS app) to build an automated phone system. They want their phone to "talk" to customers. They install a TTS app and quickly realize it cannot answer the phone, cannot hear what the caller says, and cannot make decisions.
Hear it before you finish reading
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For two-way voice — anything that involves a customer talking and the system responding — you need an AI voice agent platform. That is CallSphere's territory. We run on GPT-Realtime-2 with 128K context, 14 function tools that wire into your business systems, and natural-accent voices across 57+ languages. The voices are comparable in quality to Speechify's premium voices, but the architecture is conversational — full-duplex, sub-600ms response, with tool calling and reasoning.
For one-way consumption — you listening to text — Speechify is the right tool. For conversation, it is not.
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CallSphere is a managed AI voice and chat agent platform. We ship 6 live verticals: healthcare, real estate, sales, salon booking, after-hours escalation, and hotel concierge. Each vertical has pre-built prompts, integrations, and call flows.
A typical deployment looks nothing like a TTS app. Customer forwards their existing business number to our SIP endpoint. We provision the relevant vertical agent. We wire 2–4 of our 14 function tools to the customer's systems — for a clinic, appointment_lookup to the EHR, patient_verification for identity, sms_send for confirmations. We load the customer's hours, providers, and FAQ into pgvector RAG.
Calls flow as follows. Caller dials. CallSphere answers in 600ms. The agent listens, understands intent, takes action, confirms, and logs everything to our 20+ Postgres tables. The voice quality matches what Speechify users expect from premium TTS — natural prosody, accents, turn-taking — but the system is doing far more than reading text.
We go live in 24 hours because the agents are pre-built. Customers do not write prompts from scratch.
A real estate brokerage in San Diego came to us after trying to "automate" their phone using a recorded TTS message generated by a Speechify-like tool. The recording said "Press 1 for listings, press 2 for agents." It worked for about three weeks before customers complained — they wanted to ask questions, not navigate a menu.
We deployed CallSphere's real estate voice agent on the Growth tier ($499/mo). We wired the crm_lookup, listing_search, and appointment_schedule function tools to their CRM and MLS feed. Go-live took 4 business days. The agent now answers in English and Spanish, qualifies inbound leads (budget, area, timeline), books showings on agents' calendars, and writes everything back to the CRM.
After 60 days, qualified-lead capture from inbound calls rose 47%. The brokerage stopped routing inbound calls to whichever agent picked up first — the AI did the qualification and routed only the qualified leads. That is the difference between a TTS app and a conversational voice agent.
Still reading? Stop comparing — try CallSphere live.
CallSphere ships complete AI voice agents per industry — 14 tools for healthcare, 10 agents for real estate, 4 specialists for salons. See how it actually handles a call before you book a demo.
CallSphere pricing for conversational voice:
Speechify Premium for personal consumption is typically $11–$15/mo on their website. The two products solve different problems. Pick based on whether you need to read text aloud (Speechify) or run a phone agent for your business (CallSphere).
Is the Speechify app free? Speechify has a free tier with limited voices and features. Premium is typically $11–$15/mo for high-quality voices, faster reading speeds, and offline use. Pricing varies by region and promotion. The free tier is enough to evaluate basic functionality.
Can I use the Speechify app for my business phone? No. Speechify is a one-way reader — it reads text to you. A business phone needs two-way voice: the system listens to the caller, understands, and responds in real time. For that, you need an AI voice agent platform like CallSphere, not a TTS app.
How is the Speechify app different from CallSphere? Speechify reads text aloud for you to listen to. CallSphere is a conversational AI voice agent that answers your business phone, holds a conversation with the caller, takes action (booking, qualifying, looking up records), and integrates with your CRM or EHR. Same underlying TTS technology category, very different products.
Does the Speechify app work offline? Speechify Premium supports offline reading on mobile after you have downloaded the content. The free tier is online-only. For offline mass-document processing, look at desktop TTS tools instead.
What languages does the Speechify app support? Speechify supports roughly 30+ languages depending on the tier and platform. For comparison, CallSphere supports 57+ languages with natural accents for conversational use across voice, chat, SMS, and WhatsApp.
Is the Speechify app good for studying? Many students use it to convert PDFs, textbooks, and articles into audio. The faster reading speeds (up to 3x) help with review. For accessibility — dyslexia, low vision — Speechify is one of the most common picks. It is not a research tool; it is a consumption tool.
Can the Speechify app read scanned printed pages? Yes. The mobile app has a built-in scanner that uses OCR to convert a photo of a printed page into text and reads it aloud. Quality depends on lighting and print clarity.
What is the best alternative to the Speechify app? For one-way reading, alternatives include NaturalReader, Voice Dream, ElevenLabs Reader, and Apple's Speak Screen. For two-way conversational voice (the much more business-relevant use case), CallSphere is the platform.
Written by
Sagar Shankaran· Founder, CallSphere
LinkedInSagar Shankaran is the founder of CallSphere, where he builds production AI voice and chat agents deployed across healthcare, hospitality, real estate, and home services. He writes about agentic AI, LLM engineering, and shipping voice agents that handle real calls in production.
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