Solving Dyslexia ft. Cliff Weitzman, founder and CEO of Speechify

The second one I get is from kids who are either young professionals or in college, and they say, hey, I was considering dropping out of school, and I'm not going to because someone told me about Speedify.

Hey everyone, we're Nick and Sonja, and this is Dyslexia Journey, and today we're happy to welcome Cliff Weitzman, and let me read his bio. Cliff Weitzman is super dyslexic and couldn't figure out how to read in first to fourth grade. He learned English by listening to Harry Potter audiobooks when he was 13 and fell in love with listening. He listens to two audiobooks a week and has done so for more than 15 years.

When he studied renewable energy engineering at Brown University, he found his books didn't have audiobooks, so he built a text-to-speech system that could read out anything to him. Today, Speechify AI is the largest speech AI platform in the world. It has over 25 million users and over 100 engineers. Speechify has been the number one app in its Apple and Google App Store categories for four years, and has the largest collection of dyslexic users using it for dyslexia of any product in the world.

What OpenAI does for text, Speechify does for speech. The team started developing AI models in 2016 for speech synthesis, NLP, and computer vision. Today, they make the most realistic human-sounding AI voices in the world. Cliff, welcome to Dyslexia Journey. Thank you for having me. So to start with, tell us a little more about Speechify and how it came about. Sure. So I was going to school at Brown University, and actually, we had a summer reading book called Sons of Providence that I was having a really tough time with.

And so I went to my mom, and she started to read it to me, but she had to work, and she didn't have time to finish it. And so my brother and I ended up cracking the digital rights management software that Kindle has in order to be able to take the text, have software on my Mac, read it into my iPhone overnight, and then I listened to it as the MP3 file on the plane.

And so when I got to Brown, I improved on that software to make it work better. Even before that, though, there was a chemistry class I wanted to get into. There was advanced chemistry class at Brown, and I didn't get the chance to take AP chemistry. And my brother was taking AP chemistry at the same time. So what we did is we put the AP chemistry into a text-to-speech software, and I would lie on my bed, and Tyler would lie on his bed, and we would listen to the AP chem textbook.

And that also worked well. Both of us passed the test that we needed to take. But this was very reminiscent of when we were kids, and we would listen to Harry Potter or we would listen to Aragon. When we were kids, I was eight, Tyler was six. We would stack all of the mattresses in the house on top of each other, lie down on the mattresses, and just listen to Aragon. So we did the same thing.

In 2015, I started to read a lot of academic papers about the narrow applications of deep learning, especially as it relates to speech synthesis and optical character recognition. And I was about to graduate. I studied renewable energy engineering, so a lot of nuclear physics and photovoltaics engineering. And I found that if I was to go and make a photovoltaics product, it would probably take more than seven years to get it to market, and I didn't have that level of patience.

And I decided that whatever I did, it needed to be software. So I sat and I wrote a 30-page paper about my worldviews, and the conclusion was that I'm the person that I am because of my experience of overcoming dyslexia and audiobooks. And I distilled it down into the 28 principles I believe that most other people don't believe. And I decided that this text-to-speech thing was going to be the thing that I was going to do, and that the reason I'm on this earth is to solve dyslexia.

And so I started working on it full-time around 2015, 2016. And the goal of the company is to make sure that reading is never a barrier to learning for anyone, no matter what your background is or where you are in the world. And it's predicated on the idea that actually listening is a far better way of intaking information than reading is.

That's great. So what's the state of the company and the sort of product offerings now? Yeah. So the easiest place to use it is on Apple. If you go to the Apple App Store and you search Speechify, like this, you'll find Speechify at the top of the App Store. So it's been the number one app in this category for quite some time. And if you open the app, it makes it really easy to either scan a physical book, copy text from your clipboard, open a website, pull something from your computer, open a Kindle book, listen to ChatGPT, upload something from Google Docs, upload something from iCloud, or pull literally content from anywhere else.

And then it puts you in the library. And if I want to open a random book from the library, I could just click play. Let me pick a nice voice. Actually, let me pick my voice. Hi, my name is Cliff White. And I can listen. What can I do to change all of my habits at once? To go from single-minded startup man to lifestyle design hero? I generated one amusingly implausible idea.

To do all these things I had always wanted to do at the same time. And then I can change the video. Limited only by the seconds in a day.

And I know that sounds crazy, but that's actually how I listen to most things. It's just a matter of practice. And you can pick any voice you want. You can take Mr. Beast, you can take Snoop Dogg, you can take Glenn Paltrow. So let's say you do Snoop Dogg. So I go, okay, play. Always wanted to do at the same time. Limited only by the seconds in a day. While writing a book about it, I would max out my motivation with every trick I knew.

And if I wanted, for example, to take a picture of a physical document, I'd flip the camera. So I'll just take a picture of... I got a book here. And so I could just take a picture of any page in the book. And if I scan them, they're all right.

So I take a picture of a book. Boom. Yeah. And it captures it. And then I just click through. And then I click listen. Save.

And so that's, you know, what it does on the iPhone version. There's also a product called Speechify Audiobooks that is an Audiobooks product. So this is Speechify Classic and this is Speechify Audiobooks. So it's a direct competitor to Audible. Audible has 450,000 books. Speechify has 300,000 books. And it's partnerships we've done with the top eight publishers in the United States, letting you listen to any audiobook. And now we have, soon, we'll have about three million books that don't have an audiobook that are going to be offered on Speechify with Speechify's technology as an audiobook for people who have learning differences like dyslexia and ADHD.

And then the most important tool, I think, that is relevant to people who listen here is the Chrome extension of the Mac app. So you can highlight any text on your computer, hit a keyboard shortcut, option A, or just click play, and it'll read out whatever you have on your screen. Google Docs, Gmail, ChatGPT, the news. And so there's a little more than 25 million people who use it. It's closer to 30 million now.

It's most of the folks who have dyslexia and ADHD throughout the U.S., Canada, U.K., like most English-speaking countries. And then it's pretty prevalent in non-English-speaking countries as well because it supports, I can't remember if it's 60 or 80 languages now. But we're getting close to full coverage. It's just a matter of finding the data sets for dialects that are not as common. But I listen to everything with Speechify. So I click play on average 300 times a day.

I listen on average to 300,000 words per week with Speechify. To give you context, a normal book is between 50,000 and 80,000 words. So I'm listening to almost six books worth of information with Speechify. Every single day, I've done that for almost eight years. And the key is Speechify coaches you to learn how to listen faster. One really fun thing is that I get to work with my brother, who leads the AI team at Speechify.

And we've got about 30 AI engineers who work under Tyler and then 75 engineers who work on the SDK and the front-end products like the iPhone app and Chrome extension and Mac app inside of the rest of the company. It's amazing. That's such an amazing tool. Yeah. So hopefully everyone can know about it so they can use it. Yeah. Do you have any testimonials from dyslexic kids that you're willing to share here?

Yeah. I mean, we have literally hundreds of thousands. So if you just go to the app store and you go to the reviews, it's full. But, yeah, I can share the summaries. The most common one that I get is I'm crying. My third grader is doing her homework by herself. Like this is like the most common thing I get. The second one I get is from kids who are either young professionals or in college.

And they say, hey, I was considering dropping out of school. And I'm not going to because someone told me about Speechify. One very interesting use case that we find, not use case, but side effect, is people find that their normal reading speed gets really fast after they use it. So dyslexia is not a reading disability as much as it is a decoding difference, which means that someone with dyslexia, when they're a kid and they're supposed to read a chapter book, they don't do it because it sucks.

And therefore, they never get good enough at sight reading. Sight reading is when you see a word and you instantly know what it means. Let's say house. H-O. I don't even know how to spell house. However you spell house. And you look at it and you go, oh, that means house. Someone with dyslexia needs to do house, house. You know, do the decoding. If you look at a picture of a dog or an emoji of a dog, you know it's a dog.

And so what happens is you listen to the words. And I see the word house and hear the word house 100,000 times in one month. Next time I see the word house, I don't need to decode, right? If I see my name, I know it's my name without needing to do the math. And so a lot of times people go from reading at anywhere from 140 to 180 words per minute to starting to read at like 250, 300 words per minute because now they're recognizing on site 80% of the words that are in front of them.

And then the other thing we notice a lot is on average people start listening with Speechify at about 210 to 240 words per minute. Whilst the average reading speed in the United States is between 180 and 200 words per minute. But three weeks in, the average person is listening at 350 words per minute. And six months in, the average person is listening at 550 words per minute. And so typically people increase their listening speed over time.

The other thing we find is that people who have ADHD especially are able to focus a lot more with it because the speed at which their mind is working is very fast. But the reading ability, even if they read fast, is not as fast as they can think. And so let's say they're thinking it's 500 words per minute, but they're reading at 220. The second that you listen, it's 500 words per minute, it joins together and then you're locked in and you have a much better experience.

Yeah, that's amazing. It sounds, I mean, honestly, like it's especially integrated with other things like phones and other technologies that it's kind of an kind of all purpose. I'm just curious, are there other technologies that you think could be useful or maybe just subsets of what you've already talked about? Like, for example, the way ChatGPT is part of this. Oh, yeah. ChatGPT is amazing. So one thing that we often talk about at Speechify is type fast, fix typos.

So let's say I have ideas in my head. I just type them into ChatGPT, write my entire essay, or I can write them into a Word document, and then I'll just write fix typos. And then ChatGPT will give it back to me with no typos. And this is not just fixing my spelling. Like if something was uncapitalized, it automatically capitalizes it. And it's not fixing the spelling one word context at a time.

It reads the context and it adjusts according to what it should be. Does that make sense? And so a big issue that I had when I was a kid was even an academic workshop. I had an amazing teacher's assistant, Mark Reisler, who would sit behind me and I'd click on the red squiggle and there'd be like three options. And it'd be like that one. And then I'd go to the next one and it'd be like that one.

Because I didn't know which one of the options was the right option. But ChatGPT can just do it for you. So like spelling is like, to be honest, completely irrelevant in 2023. Like if you have access to ChatGPT, like there's no reason why an email will ever have a spelling mistake. Even before that, 80% of my spelling mistakes I can catch with Speechify because I can hear the spelling mistakes when it reads it back out to me.

So I'll just fix it on that. So Speechify, ChatGPT, learning how to touch type fast is like the most valuable thing I could possibly emphasize. Learning how to listen fast, Speechify books.

Really, if you have those things, like you just have a huge advantage compared to normal people because you both have the benefits of dyslexia and you learn how to listen fast. So you can consume a book three times faster than a normal person, which, by the way, it means that you can also do it while working out and eating and cooking. And so it'll save you extra time. Yeah, really, those are all the tools you need.

So I have a follow-up here because you may have heard that teachers, professors, you know, everyone's like, you can't use AI, you can't use AI. I'm just wondering, like, what are your thoughts on how to bring that in? Because, you know, like you're saying, you're talking about you're putting your own content in and then using it from there. So, I mean, I have never heard not a single intelligent teacher or professor say we could not use AI.

If someone tells you to not use AI, you can infer their level of intelligence as a result of that. That's the same thing as saying, oh, you're hard of sight. Well, you're not allowed glasses in this school. You can't walk well. You're not allowed it. How dare you use crutches? How dare you use a wheelchair? It's literally, there's no difference. It's exactly the same thing. So I am nearsighted. I wear contact lenses.

It would be so preposterous for someone to go take off those glasses when you enter my classroom. It's exactly the same thing. There's literally no difference. So that's the first thing to say. The second thing to say is, you know, I was talking to a group of voice actors recently today. And they had a concern of, oh, my God, AI is going to take away my job. I was like, well, that's also, you know, not the right way to think about it.

Because that's the same thing as a photographer saying Lightroom, which is a derivative of Photoshop, is going to take my job. Lightroom is not going to take away your job. You just got to make sure that you learn how to use the tool and when you take a digital photo, edit it in Lightroom because you'll be better. Photographers who learn how to use Lightroom will win against you because they learn how to use a new piece of technology.

You know, double-entry bookkeeping was invented by Jacob Huger in, like, the 1500s. Yeah, he became the richest person in the world because he kept correct accounts of his books. Someone who does finance in New York doesn't go, oh, my God, Excel should not be allowed. No, you just use Excel and you are the best person in finance. You think a normal engineer goes, you're not allowed to use a calculator? Of course they don't say that.

They go and use a calculator because they have intelligence. Like, the definition of it, the definition, actually, the actual definition between a human and an animal is humans invent tools and use them. And so, of course, you should use the tools. That's the point of the world and technology and intelligence. Now, does that mean that you shouldn't learn how to read? No, of course you should still learn how to read. You know, I have a car.

I still know how to walk. I still know how to run. Like, yeah, you need to learn how to use both. But A, there's no reason why you can't learn both at the same time. And B, the idea of do not use tools that make you more intelligent and help you learn faster, it doesn't really make sense. Yeah, that's a great answer. Yeah, I'm glad I asked you. So, let's see. I'll actually give you one more thing.

So, you know, we're mainly discussing here, like, chat CPT, but, so, Speechify is one of the biggest advertisers on, like, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. And about 50% of the ads is just straight up me talking to the camera. In the first three years, the most popular comment that I would get on the ads, about 50%, was, this is cheating. Millennials are ruining the world. This is so lazy. And by the way, thank you for those comments because my ads are cheaper because they get high engagement.

And it typically was for people who are above the age of 50.

And, again, like, that's a funny thing to say because it doesn't harm you that I can listen faster. Do the same thing. Like, just also listen fast. And I'm a much better reader now because I had the chance to learn how to sight read through Speechify. And so, yeah, it harkens back to the same answer that I said before. Like, technology is there like glasses. Like, technology, like, AI and glasses are literally the same thing.

There's no difference. And I can predict what someone who, like, is a Luddite and strongly opinionated in a negative manner, right? There's strong opinions loosely held. And someone who has strong opinions strongly held doesn't want to progress. They might say, oh, but AI generates the answer for you. Well, it really doesn't because you need to prompt it. You still need to edit it. It just results in you being able to get more done faster.

You know, it's literally the same thing as saying, hey, I'm either going to pick, you know, cotton gin. I'm going to pick the cotton by hand or I'm going to, I'm sorry, I'm going to sew the cotton by hand or I'm going to use a cotton gin. Obviously, you should use a cotton gin. And so, it's exactly the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. And this just kind of leads right into the next question.

You kind of are already saying it. But Speechify is so wonderful, obviously, for people, dyslexic people. We've talked about ADHD. But really, you know, it can benefit everyone. And a lot of these technologies and things, when we do consider people with learning differences, it actually does benefit everyone. So, I was just curious if you had any more thoughts on that. Yeah. I mean, only about 30, 35% of our users have a learning difference.

Most don't. They're doctors, lawyers, accountants, people in the military, executives, people with finance. There's a very strong history of innovation coming from people who have disabilities and then becoming mainstream. So, the guy who owns the patent for recorded sound is Edison. And Edison was deaf, like, for the most part. Very, very low hearing ability. And the reason why he came up with the innovation is, as part of the process, he would put his hand on the wood.

Literally put his hand on the wood to feel the vibrations because he couldn't hear them very well. And then he thought, oh, well, what if we stretch out a drum and we put a pin and, you know, that we can document sound. And that's what happened. And eventually, that became the telephone. And everyone uses the telephone, not just people who are deaf. And so, like, this is a normal thing. I have many, all my friends, by the way.

Not a single one does not count. All of my friends listen to audiobooks. All of them. And all of them listen to 2X Peter or above. Many of them listen to podcasts, too. I have a friend, Max Deutsch. Max is a very fast reader. He can read a book in a sitting. And yet, 80%, 90% of the books he consumes are with audiobooks. By the way, he listens to as many books as me.

So, there's my friend, Valentin. So, there's my brother, Tyler. None of them have dyslexia. But they all listen to audiobooks religiously. All of us. We make up with it. Like, this is literally all of my friends. All of them. Chaitu, Simon, everybody. Rohan. We wake up. We put our AirPods in. We click play on our audiobook. We brush our teeth. We go eat breakfast. We cook breakfast. We eat breakfast. We're still listening.

We get in the car. We're still listening. The first time we take out our audiobook is when we say hi to a friend or we start working on our computer. And then when we go to the toilet, we're listening to the audiobook again. Like, I'm listening to an audiobook the entire day. If I'm not conversing with another person or actively working. And again, it's not just me. It's everybody. My dad is 67 years old.

He immigrated to the United States from Israel. He does not have dyslexia. He uses Speechify on his desktop computer all the time. And I know this because whenever there's a bug, I get a WhatsApp message about it. And then I need to go fix his Speechify. But the majority of the users of Speechify don't have a learning difference. It makes more sense to listen than to read because we've been listening for so much longer.

Last thing I'll say, when you read, the majority of your brain is focused on decoding. So it's like 97% of your brain literally is decoding and 3% is paying attention and comprehending. When you listen, it's flipped. 3% of your brain is working on decoding. 97% is paying attention. And so if you can give yourself the opportunity to do that on a regular basis, that's amazing.

That's really interesting. I wanted to follow up on one thing you said earlier. You mentioned the benefits of dyslexia. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit sort of personally as someone who's dyslexic and who's a successful entrepreneur. Like what specifically about dyslexia do you think helps you be a better entrepreneur? Yeah. So, before I started working on Speechify, I built a lot of physical products. I, my spatial reasoning is very high.

So I given any object can see the 3d model in my head, can spin around, know what it'll look like around the corner and being very good at sketching as a result. so like anything mechanical engineering, I have an advantage. my pattern recognition is very good. and also I'm very good at pulling disparate ideas from different fields and connecting them in a way that is not particularly obvious. there's a saying, smart is hitting a target other people can't hit.

Genius is hitting a target other people can't see. And so dyslexic people often will come to conclusions that are non-obvious, but can actually result in a much better outcome. and so I really like studying other people who are dyslexic. and I find it funny that some people who are not dyslexic are like touted to be dyslexic. So like Einstein is clearly not dyslexic. Steve jobs is clearly not dyslexic. Bill Gates is clearly not dyslexic.

if you read their actual biographies, even though some places say that they are, but there's a lot of amazing people who are dyslexics, right? So like Richard Branson is dyslexic. Tom Cruise is dyslexic. there's a couple of astronauts that are dyslexic. and, the, the, the founder of Ikea is dyslexic, right? Great face, spatial reasoning. and so spatial reasoning, cross-pollination. And then for me, in many ways, dyslexia has been useful because it is a setback that is not an existential threat.

so you can get over it. there's a show called Naruto. It's like, an anime and there's a character there called sensei guy. Sensei guy goes the entire show with weights on his hands and on his feet. And only when he's losing a fight, it's like a ninja show. He will take off the weights from his hands and his feet. And when he does that, no one comes even close to him. Like he destroys anyone who comes like no one has a chance.

And so every kid who's listening to his show, when you're six, seven, eight, nine, 10, go back to everybody else in your class. You have weights on your hands and on your feet and on your head. And when you're an adult and you get to use tools like speechify, those ways are off. And so you have gone through so much more challenge and developed so much more in your personality. And you learn that failure is okay.

And then if you work hard, you'll succeed. and learning that when you're that young, it's like a crucible, right? The, the strongest presser pressure creates the most beautiful diamonds. And so that's exactly what happens. And so I think that's what happened to me is I needed to overcompensate for my dyslexia in every way, shape or form. I could, I convinced friends to come to, study sessions with me. and they would read the book and I'd explain it, right?

I needed to learn how to communicate with teachers. I need to learn how to self-advocate. I became very verbal, right? And so I joined the speech and debate team and I was like a very good speech and debate person. and I developed the ability to listen and I developed the ability to speak extemporaneously. I did impromptu speaking in high school. and I took it very seriously because I realized that reading and writing were not my strengths, but listening and speaking work.

And then I still work nonstop on my weaknesses as well. Like I practice reading all the time and I practice writing all the time. And I remember I took a class that was an elective class called, advanced placement, AP comp, advanced placement, composition, English composition. And I had an amazing teacher, Mr. Blaber who like taught me how to write. and so again, the fact that you have these tools is not a reason not to learn how to write, not to learn how to read.

Like obviously you should learn these things too. but I think that the auditory person portion for people who are dyslexic is also amazing. And so maybe audit audio is not your thing. Maybe sketching is your thing. Maybe sports are your thing, whatever it might be, but like, find the thing that is your strength and then use it to, to succeed. And then later when you get to use tools like speechify, then, you know, you're far ahead of everybody else.

Yeah. yeah, that was great advice there too. any final words as we, as we close this episode? Well, I'll say the thing I said, last time, which is you're not stupid. You're not lazy. and most importantly, parents, they're not stupid. They're not lazy. Their brains just work differently. And the number of fun thing that you could do for the success of your child is actually not to teach them how to read.

It's not to teach them how to write. It's to tell them that you love them over and over and over again and to hug them and kiss them and make them believe that there's a floor of which beneath which they can never sink ever. No matter what, they could become nonverbal. You don't, you don't care. You have an F. I don't care. I love you regardless. and so love cannot like, right?

The term unconditional love comes from the fact that it is not conditional. So never make your love conditional. you can make getting a new bike conditional, right? You can make getting new shoes conditional, but your love is unconditional. and it should be that your love is unconditional. Your partner's love is unconditional and their sibling's love is unconditional. That's the most important thing I can say. And then after that, learn how to listen to double speed and triple speed with speechify and then learn how to listen with audio books and learn how to touch type.

That's all. Awesome. Well, Cliff, thank you very much. we will drop links to speechify in the show notes. And, yeah, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you so much. My pleasure, guys. Absolutely.

Thank you.