BabaVoices › Use cases › ADHD and dyslexia

Dictation and read-aloud for ADHD and dyslexia

If a dense email takes three passes to read and a reply takes twenty minutes of second-guessing, the problem may be the format, not you. BabaVoices lets you hear text instead of reading it and say your reply instead of typing it, then tidies the spoken version into something you can send.

Two halves of the same job

Work email is a loop of reading and writing, and for many people with dyslexia both halves are slow for different reasons. Reading a long message means decoding every word, losing your place, and going back to check what the second paragraph actually asked. Writing the reply means watching for red underlines, rephrasing to avoid words you can't spell with confidence, and rereading the whole thing before you trust it. People with ADHD often describe a different friction: starting the reply at all, holding the thought long enough to get it down, and staying with a wall of text without drifting to something else.

BabaVoices puts listening and speaking at the center. To read, you paste the email, document or web link into the Reader and press Play; it reads aloud at the speed you choose, and you can tap any paragraph to start from there or double-tap a sentence to hear just that sentence again. To write, you tap the mic and talk the reply through, as you would explain it to a colleague. The browser writes down whole words, so spelling never comes into it, and Polish, which uses Anthropic's Claude, removes the filler and false starts and fixes punctuation and grammar. The text is copied when you stop, ready to paste. It is not a treatment or a diagnosis tool; it is a different way to do the same work.

A workflow for a hard email

1. Listen first. Copy the email, open the Reader, paste it and press Play (or Alt+P). If it's a link to a long article, paste the address and the Reader pulls the article text out of the page, without the menus and ads.
2. Replay the part that matters. Double-tap the sentence with the question in it to hear it again, instead of hunting for it on screen.
3. Say the reply straight away, while the question is still in your head. Switch to Dictate, press Alt+R, and talk. Don't stop to restart sentences; Polish keeps the version you settle on.
4. Hear your own reply. Press Listen to have the polished text read back to you. Hearing it is often a faster check than rereading it.
5. Paste and send. The text is already on your clipboard.

Making the screen easier on your eyes

When you do read on screen, Settings lets you pick from about twenty fonts, including wide sans-serifs such as Verdana, Tahoma and Century Gothic, and set the text size up to 40 pixels. Dark mode is one key away (Alt+M). The read-aloud speed goes from half speed to five times normal; many people settle around 1.2x to 1.5x once they are used to it. Every common action has a keyboard shortcut, listed under Alt+H, so you don't need to find small buttons.

Before and after

A project update, spoken in one breath after listening to a manager's question about a delayed deliverable.

Every restart ("I can, I'll") and every interrupted thought ("because, wait") is resolved to what you ended up saying. The dates and the dependency on finance are intact. Nothing was added that you didn't say.

Honest limitations

• The voices are your device's voices. Listen and the Reader use the speech voices built into your browser and operating system. Some are natural; some are noticeably robotic. If your device's voices tire you out, try Edge, which ships several natural-sounding voices. Higher-quality voices are planned for paid plans.
• Dictation needs a supported browser. Chrome, Edge and Safari work; Firefox can use the Reader but cannot dictate.
• You still review before sending. Recognition can mishear names and numbers. Having the reply read back to you is a good way to catch them.
• Speaking isn't always possible. In an open-plan office or on a train, dictation may not suit you. Typed text pasted into the app can be polished and read aloud too.
• The free plan has a daily Polish limit. Dictation and read-aloud are free. Polish is 10 a day without an account and 25 when signed in.

Frequently asked questions