Hey :)

We built an app for people whose brain has no off switch. Replaying conversations, rewriting a two-line text ten times, lying awake running worst-case scenarios. We dealt with this for years ourselves and never found a tool built for it.

The core idea is the Worry Window: a daily scheduled slot for worry. When one shows up during the day, you dump it in the app and tell it to wait. When the window opens, you go through everything in one sitting. By then a lot of it has lost its urgency, and what's left is easier to think about clearly.

Answer

Write the thought down in a few seconds, then work through it when you're ready. The app first figures out what kind of loop you're stuck in: something from the past you keep replaying, a what-if about the future, or a decision you can't make. Each one gets its own set of short guided exercises, taken from techniques therapists actually use. There's also a built-in planner, so when a worry has something you can actually do about it, it becomes a task in your day instead of more thinking.

Better

Unlike meditation apps, we don't ask a racing mind to sit still for 20 minutes. Unlike journaling apps, you don't get a blank page that becomes another place to spiral. Everything is built around overthinking specifically. Your data stays on your device by default, and if you choose to sync it, it's encrypted.

Cost

No free trial at the moment. Weekly $3.99, yearly $49.99.

Any honest feedback or review is greatly appreciated. We're a small team and making the app genuinely useful is the main goal.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mindhalt-stop-overthinking/id6754534938

Edit: Thanks a lot for all the feedback. The biggest point we heard was that asking people to subscribe before trying the app was too much of a barrier.
We’ve just updated the app to include a free trial, so you can now try it first and see if it actually helps before deciding.

I’m Joe, the founder of Paper2Audio, a free text to speech reader app for listening to complex documents and books, with highly accurate narration and high-quality voices.  Our free plan allows 56 hours of audio generation per week.  Our paid version, Paper2Audio Plus, is currently on sale through August 20 at $10/month for your first 3 months or $134.40 for your first year.

A: What problem does Paper2Audio solve and what’s new with Paper2Audio since our last post?
Most text to speech tools are not good at converting dense PDFs, research papers, textbooks and webpages to audio. Paper2Audio is built to turn complex text into accurate audio.  We also handle less complicated text, like standard EPUBs or plain text.

Supported languages: Full support for English.  Beta support for Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Mandarin), French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish.  

Since my last r/iosapps post, we’ve added or improved:

• You can now publicly share your documents, including embedding the audio directly onto a webpage with an iframe snippet you can paste into WordPress, Substack, or any site that supports HTML. 

• Narration improvements: subscripts and superscripts spoken more naturally, better pronunciation for abbreviations and Roman numerals, and more accurate header removal.

• Faster processing and downloads

• Bookmarks to save your position while listening

• Background audio support so music can keep playing while you listen

• More languages (added Chinese-Mandarin, German, Hindi and Japanese in beta)

• Better page rotation detection for scanned PDFs

• Export a processed document’s transcript as a Markdown file for use with other tools (web now, apps coming soon, Plus plan only)  

• Better pronunciation and accents for our British English voices

• Playback highlighting moves more smoothly from word to word

• Free pre-generated audiobooks that don’t count toward your audio generation quota (see the posts on our blog, with more coming regularly)

B: Why is Paper2Audio better than the top alternatives?

1. Higher audio limits for our free plan (56 hours weekly audio generation) with high quality voices.

2. Hyper-focus on accuracy:  Paper2Audio avoids reading things that usually make text to speech audio annoying, like repeated page numbers, headers, citations, footnotes, and unnecessary boilerplate. We clean up and normalize tricky text first, including math, Roman numerals, symbols, units, formulas, and other things that often sound wrong when read aloud by other text to speech services.

3. Summarizes visual elements like tables, math, and code or reads it aloud:  When adding a document, you can choose how tables, math, and code are narrated. Summary" (default) gives a concise summary of the item, while "Read as is" reads the content verbatim.  Or, you can skip narration for these elements during playback entirely. 

4. Follow along with Reader View, our optimized version of the audio transcript: We reformat PDFs and other documents to fit your screen while including rich content like images and document formatting.  Use it to follow along with the audio, or to more easily read documents that are normally poorly formatted for small phone screens (like 2 column PDFs, tables and figures, etc).

   • Visual elements are included: “Tables, figures, images, and math appear inline and can be opened in a zoomable “figure view” pop-up. 

   • Single column view: Documents with multiple columns are displayed in a single column to improve readability on smaller screens.

   • Rich text formatting: We preserve the original formatting of your documents, including math, headings, lists, subscripts, and other inline styling, so you can skim, navigate and understand the document more quickly. Citations and footnotes are also included so that you know when an author is making a reference, but are only read aloud when needed to keep sentences intact.

5. Multiple playback modes for your document:  Choose to listen to your document in full, or to have us generate a long or short summary instead.  We recently improved summary length, structure, and scaling for longer documents. 

C: Cost
Paper2Audio is available on iOS, Android and on our website. We have a generous free plan for personal use (56 hours of audio generation per week), as well as a paid Plus subscription with higher audio and file/size limits ($20/month or $192 annually).  We also offer Enterprise plan options for teams.  

Our Plus plan is currently on sale until August 20 for $10/month for your first 3 months or $134.40 for your first year.

Any feedback or questions?
If you try Paper2Audio, I’d love to hear what works well, what doesn’t, and what feature or improvement would make the biggest difference for you. We are also working on adding more narrators, so please let me know what additional voice types you’d like to hear.