By 
Peech is a text-to-speech reader developed by Dopefin Limited, available on Android, iPhone, iPad, and Mac (if it has the Apple M1 chip). It also offers a Google Chrome extension. The app’s subscription options can be a bit confusing, but I ended up getting it for $69.99 per year, $6.99 per week, or $59.99 for six months. Is it worth the price? Let’s find out.
This review focuses on the iPad version of Peech. The app stands out as the most minimalist I’ve ever seen, which is quite refreshing. The homepage is incredibly simple and clean, but it made me wonder how functional it really is.
One of the first options Peech offers is to type plain text, which you can then save and listen to. However, this feature seems a bit limited without any grammar checking. I’m not sure how useful it is—has anyone ever wanted their own writing read back to them without any corrections?
You can also import documents into the app. I decided to push its limits by using a scanned document, even though Peech has a built-in option to scan directly. The OCR feature extracts text into a plain format, which works best with non-technical documents. It’s surprisingly accurate, even bringing in embedded videos from web pages.
The text-to-speech feature in Peech is impressive. The voices sound natural, avoiding that typical robotic AI tone. The app highlights the text as it reads, making it easy to follow along. Occasionally, the highlighting feature doesn’t work perfectly, but it’s a minor bug that doesn’t disrupt the overall experience. Peech offers two voices, one male and one female, but you can’t choose which voice to use. This is the first time I’ve seen such a limitation in a text-to-speech app, which makes me wonder how it handles other languages. If anyone has used Peech to read non-English text, I’d love to hear about your experience.
Interestingly, one voice reads the titles while the other reads the paragraphs, but this only works if they’re clearly marked in the document. The voices alternate with each new document, which is a nice touch since you can’t choose which voice you prefer. Thankfully, both voices are pleasant to listen to.
Peech’s minimalism extends to its functionality, making it intuitive and easy to use. You can quickly start listening to your documents and adjust the reading speed, which ranges from 0.75x to 2x. While the range isn’t vast, it’s still useful. I do wish the app allowed you to tap different parts of the document to skip directly to them, but currently, you can only skip to pre-divided sections, which isn’t as precise as I’d like.
You can change the font size of the text, with smaller sizes fitting more information on the screen and larger sizes making the text easier to read. However, even the larger text doesn’t feel that big—it just seems like a standard size. Beyond that, there isn’t much more you can do in the app. The search tool only works on document titles, and the settings are minimal. But if you’re here for quick, stress-free reading, you probably don’t need many features. I appreciate the inclusion of a dyslexia-friendly font, which is a thoughtful addition by the developers.
Organization within Peech is simple, using tags that form tabs above your documents. While this setup might seem limiting, it can actually handle quite a few tags, though you might need to scroll through them as you add more. It’s not the most sophisticated organization system, but if you’re just looking to read documents quickly, it gets the job done. However, the lack of a recycle bin is a downside—if you accidentally delete something, you’ll need to re-import it, which can be a hassle.
I was curious if the Google Chrome extension would offer more, but unfortunately, I couldn’t log in, even after two attempts. It seems there’s something wrong with the extension, so I gave up on that.
If you have a lot of documents to go through and prefer not to read them yourself, Peech can be a handy tool. It’s unclear whether all processing happens on your device, but for $5 a month (with a yearly subscription), it’s a reasonable deal. However, you’re limited to reading within the app itself—there’s no Safari extension, and the Google Chrome one didn’t work for me. I wish it could be used across all apps on the iPad, as that would make life easier. While I’ve seen more expensive AI tools that don’t work nearly as well, Peech actually delivers.
Are any of you interested in a tool like Peech? If you have better suggestions, I’d love to hear about them!
