The reading list never shrinks
New papers arrive faster than desk time. Triage by abstract alone misses the ones that matter.
For PhD students and researchers
Read the literature on the way to the lab.
A literature review is hundreds of papers, and most of them need one careful pass and no more. Aethel reads each paper aloud in order, equations and figures included, so the first pass can happen away from the desk. Stop on any sentence to ask what it means, and keep the passages worth citing.
Five books and an hour of narration free. No card needed.
The problem
Methods sections are where audio fails
General readers skip or mangle the equations, so the part you most need to check is the part you cannot hear.
Notes end up everywhere
A highlight in one app, a question in another, the PDF in a third. Finding the passage again costs more than reading it did.
How Aethel helps
arXiv and PDFs in one step
Paste an arXiv link or upload a PDF. Two-column pages are read in order, and the reference list is shown but not read aloud.
The maths, spoken
Equations are read as maths inside the sentence and stay on screen, so you can check a derivation line by line later.
Ask in place
Tap a sentence and ask what a term means, why a step follows, or for an example. The answer is about that passage.
Notes you can take with you
Save the passages worth citing and export them as Markdown for your notes or your thesis draft.
What you will hear
These are produced live by the same speech engine the app uses. Press Listen to hear them in your device's voice; in the app you choose a studio or ElevenLabs voice.
Attention(Q, K, V) = softmax(QKᵀ / √dₖ)V
Aethel says
Attention of Q, K, V equals softmax of the quantity Q K transpose over the square root of d sub k, times V
Vaswani et al., “Attention Is All You Need”, NeurIPS 2017, equation 1
P(A|B) = P(B|A) P(A) / P(B)
Aethel says
P of A given B equals P of B given A, times P of A, over P of B
θ ← θ − η ∇L(θ)
Aethel says
theta is updated to theta minus eta times the gradient of L of theta
Get started in three steps
- 1Create a free account.
- 2Paste the arXiv link of the next paper on your list, or upload its PDF.
- 3Listen to the abstract, introduction and conclusion first. Go back for the method if the paper earns it.
Questions
Can I listen to papers that are not on arXiv?
Yes. Any text-based or scanned PDF can be uploaded, including publisher PDFs you have access to through your library.
Does it read out the citations and the reference list?
The reference list is shown but not read. Numbered citation markers such as [12] are left out of the audio; author–year citations in the text are read as written.
Can I listen to my own thesis draft?
Yes. Export a chapter as a PDF and listen to it. Hearing your own text read aloud is a quick way to find the sentences that do not work.
Is there a student price?
Sign up with your university email address and the student discount is applied at checkout when a student offer is running.
Hear your own book this way.
Free to start: five books and an hour of narration, no card needed.