Graduate seminars, industry whitepapers, and exported lecture notes share a habit: they arrive as PDFs, and they demand more focused sitting time than you have. Listening is not a replacement for deep reading, but it is a strong way to get a first pass while you walk, cook, or ride the train.
Junco Reader is built for that first pass: drop the file in the browser, download the voice model once, and listen. Private and free.
A practical workflow
- Export or download the PDF / Markdown / TXT you care about.
- Open read.tryjunco.com.
- Drop the file (or paste a cleaned excerpt if the PDF is layout-heavy).
- Download the Kokoro voice model if you have not already.
- Start at 1×. Bump speed only after you confirm the extraction sounds sane.
Tip: dense two-column academic PDFs sometimes extract out of reading order. If the narration jumps around, paste the abstract and introduction first, or copy text from a cleaner HTML/Markdown version of the paper when one exists.
What works well
- Text-layer PDFs (most born-digital papers)
- Markdown notes from Obsidian, Notion exports, or course wikis
- Pasted excerpts when you only need a section
What works poorly
- Scanned page images without OCR
- Heavy slide decks that are mostly figures
- Papers where equations dominate every paragraph (you will still want eyes-on-screen for the math)
Privacy for unpublished work
Draft theses, lab notes, and review copies should not casually go to a cloud TTS upload form. Junco Reader keeps parsing and synthesis in the browser. That is the point.
Newsletters vs papers
If your unread pile is journals and PDFs, Reader is the tool. If it is email newsletters, use the Junco iOS app so tomorrow’s issues show up as a short podcast without manual imports.