My phone kept filling up with articles, web pages, PDFs, screenshots, and notes. I saved them because I really did want to read them, then ended up too tired, too busy, or too far from a good reading moment. Hearem started from that very ordinary problem.
At first, I just wanted to finish things
The first need was simple: put in some text, then keep going while walking, commuting, or doing chores.
The real work turned out to be all the small stuff around that. Web pages need to be cleaned up. Screenshots need good OCR. Long text needs splitting. The voice has to be comfortable enough to hear for more than a minute.
So Hearem is not trying to be a complicated tool. It is a way to turn things you already wanted to read into something easier to finish.
Text can come from anywhere
In real use, text comes from all over the place. It might be a web page, copied text, a PDF, or a screenshot sitting in Photos.
That is why Hearem supports paste, web reading, OCR, document import, and the iOS share sheet. You should not have to organize everything first just to listen to it.
When something can happen locally, such as image text recognition, Hearem tries to do it locally first. It is faster, and it avoids unnecessary uploads.
The voice has to be easy to listen to
A short sentence can sound a little rough and still be fine. A long article is different. If the voice is stiff or the pauses feel wrong, you get tired quickly.
Hearem lets you use Apple's built-in free voices, choose from different AI voices, or clone your own voice. Not every piece needs the fanciest voice, but it helps to have options.
If the source text is long, messy, or mixed across languages, Magic Editor can clean it up before you generate the audio.
For the moments when reading is awkward
The main use cases are very normal: walking, commuting, cooking, getting ready for bed, or just taking a break from the screen.
Generated audio keeps playing in the background and on the lock screen. When you need the source again, subtitles, bookmarks, and sentence-level seeking help you find your place.
After a while, it feels less like a one-off generator and more like a listening list built from your own material.
What I am improving next
Hearem is still not perfect. Some web pages fail to parse, some long documents could be handled more smoothly, and some voices need better filtering and tuning.
The next work is mostly about the basics: smoother import, more reliable playback, better voices, and pricing that makes sense for daily use.
Feedback from real routines helps a lot, whether that means listening to papers on the commute, turning study notes into audio, or saving web pages for bedtime. Many small product decisions come from those details.
