Read Smoother — AI skill for Claude Code

English | [中文](README.zh.md) | [日本語](README.ja.md)

Read Smoother

**Read smoother: listen while you read.** Read Smoother is a small local web app that reads a PDF aloud, sentence by sentence, with Microsoft's neural voices, and keeps the sentence highlighted on the page as the voice moves. Hover a word for its dictionary entry. Press one key to send the sentence you love to your notes. Open a paper straight from your Zotero library. And ask your own AI what the sentence you are listening to means, right there on the page.

Its Chinese name is 畅读 (*chàngdú*): reading that flows.


🌱 Why Read Smoother exists

Read Smoother grew out of a very concrete problem: reading academic English with the eyes alone is slow. On a dense page attention drifts and the thread gets lost. Listening and reading at the same time helps, and that is more than one reader's habit. In second-language research, reading while listening improves comprehension and reading rate compared with reading alone (Chang & Millett, 2015) or listening alone (Chang, 2009), and new words stick better when they are read and heard together (Brown, Waring & Donkaewbua, 2008; Webb & Chang, 2012).

Screen readers and audiobook apps supply the voice, but not the rest of what reading needs: the text in front of the reader, a dictionary, a place for notes, and someone to ask when a paragraph will not open up. Read Smoother puts all of that on one page, wired to the tools researchers already live in (Obsidian and Zotero), with an AI that actually knows where the reader is in the book.

✨ What it does

• Reads any text PDF aloud with Microsoft neural voices (47 English voices; other locales configurable). Speed 0.6× to 2×. The current sentence is highlighted on the page and the page turns by itself. Sentences split across two pages are read as one; running headers, page numbers, publisher download stamps and footnotes are shown dimmed and skip