Speaker 1: Here are all of the hidden gems that I think you should know about for your research. The first one is Audemic. Here, essentially, it's all about listening to papers, as are all of these, by the way. And you can see here that you can upload a new paper, and I've uploaded an old paper of mine, actually two of them, here and here, and the one thing I love about it is that once you've uploaded it, it comes up with these key statements, and that is essentially just a quick summary of the paper, a really sort of nice way to summarize it, but it goes further than that because it also takes all of the components and turns them into an easy audio file with an AI voice. You get the figures, the references, and everything is kind of like extracted. The one thing I love about these key statements, so you can kind of easily sort of like think about the paper and whether or not you want to read it further. So let's have a little listen to the voice.

Speaker 2: Pathway to high throughput, low-cost indium-free transparent electrodes.

Speaker 1: That's a little bit boring and slow, but you can turn it up. Let's go horse. Let's do some horse research talking.

Speaker 2: A roll-to-roll compatible.

Speaker 1: All right, that's a little bit quicker. Let's see how fast it is on cheetah.

Speaker 2: Transparent planar electrode comprising an interwoven network.

Speaker 1: The one thing I actually am pretty impressed about is that it does actually say these words quite well. So if you have got quite a technical language field, you can actually use this, and it does a really good job, better than the sort of like generic text-to-speech processors that I've used in the past. And as far as I can tell, it's free for up to five papers. Now stay tuned because even though this one is great, I think they get better as we go through this list. So stay around. The second app that I think you should know about is Listening, listening.io. It's actually a combination of a web interface and something you need to do on your phone. So here I've connected my phone to mirror to my laptop, so you can see, where are we here? This is the interface. You can use the web interface to simply upload a PDF. You click here and then you can go to all of your different outputs or papers. So let's have a look, let's have a look at that one. We'll upload it here. And what will happen is it will turn the PDFs into audio and send it to your phone. The one thing I love about this, that because it's on my phone, I can imagine a situation where I've got a bit of a commute and I could upload say three or four papers that I want to listen to on the way back home. An easy way to make the most of that kind of downtime where otherwise you would be doing really sort of like boring doom scrolling on your phone. And you can see this is actually where we're uploading the file at the moment. It does cost money by the way. It costs money if I go to settings, you can see that it costs $12 a month. If you are wanting to make the most of that commute or that downtime by listening to your papers, consider subscribing. This isn't sponsored by the way. So yeah, now this is in my list. I don't really like that there's these kind of like massive things here. But ultimately, once it goes black, you can click on it. And then you can see you've got all of the different sections and how long they take to listen to. So the one thing I love about this is that you can actually go through and choose the section you want to listen to. And I like that it's on my phone. This is the only one that's kind of like the easiest to use on your phone and you can take it with you as long as you've got an internet connection. All right, let's have a bit of a listen to the audio.

Speaker 3: Engineering vertical morphology with nanoparticulate organic photovoltaic devices.

Speaker 1: And you can change the speed down here, which I really like. And you can also take notes as well. So you can actually have a look to see what it's reading and take notes as you're sort of like sat listening to it. So not a bad app and the only one in this list that's actually on your phone. So give it a go if you like to travel and do stuff at the same time. I think that's really good. If you're still skeptical about whether you should actually use these text to speech tools for academic research, at the end of this video, I'm going to go through the reasons why you should and how I would use it and stay around because it's really important information that will make sure you get the most out of these tools. The last one I think you should know about is Natural Reader, completely free. And the great thing is is that it does the scientific and research stuff not so bad. So here you can see that once you're logged in, you've got your library, account, blah, blah, blah, all of this stuff. But essentially, this is one that I have uploaded and you can see that you just get to interact with the PDF directly. And that's one thing I really like about it is that here you can just click on things and it will read it out to you. Let's take a bit of a listen.

Speaker 3: Structure and morphology play a critical role in determining the performance of organic photovoltaic devices.

Speaker 1: All right, it's pretty slow at one. So a lot of these things I would turn up to, let's say about 1.5, 1.75, something like that, and it's probably a bit better.

Speaker 3: In this paper, organic photovoltaic devices are an extremely promising technology for low-cost sustainable energy generation.

Speaker 1: One thing I like is that it highlights the words as you go along and you can also have a look at the closed captions as well. So if you're having problems focusing on a paper, get the closed captions up and then you can just follow along underneath. There we are, perfect. So here I really like that you can interact directly with the PDF, it's not extracting stuff. So a really great way if you're sat at your computer and you're struggling to focus, just get Natural Reader up and then see if it actually improves your comprehension. I know it does for me. When I am listening and reading at the same time, I know that it really sort of like focuses my mind. Otherwise, I'm thinking about everything else while my eyes are scanning the page. So the question is, why would you want to use these? I know that was on the front of my mind and I think now that I've actually sort of played about with a few of them, I can see a number of benefits. Obviously, the first one is accessibility. If you have problems reading papers due to the small text or you need another way to consume them, this is going to make academic research much more palatable for those people. Also, multitasking. Now, I'm not a big fan of this, but one thing I do like about the one that's on your phone in particular is the fact that you can actually do other things while you're listening to your papers. It's no longer just to sit down in a chair and read and force yourself to absorb the information. You can do other stuff, but I think you probably won't get the most out of these sort of apps if you are multitasking all the time while listening to papers because they're not much of a fun read or listen, to be honest. So you do need to force yourself a little bit. The one thing I do like is it kind of helps you get over reading fatigue. Now, I know I've been sat in my office trying to read papers and my mind just switches off. The one thing I love about this is it does allow you to read and listen to the paper at the same time, especially something like Natural Reader where you can see the actual PDF. It relies less on the extraction of information, which sometimes can be a bit dodgy in the AI world, particularly when it comes to extracting it from PDF papers. Another reason I think you should use this is for pacing. I know that when I read, I get impatient and I scan quickly, so quickly that in fact, sometimes I feel like my eyes are just skimming over the content and I'm not absorbing it. Even by using an audio synthesizer like these tools, while reading a paper, I think can really help you absorb the information and mean that you're less sort of likely just to skim over stuff that will actually be important. I remember having to read sections over and over again until they sink into my brain. This, I think, will help you get it in there in the first go. And I think one of the biggest benefits of this as well is that you can use it for proofreading. If you've got a final draft or a manuscript that's ready to be sent off, actually listening to what you've written is a great way of catching all of those silly little mistakes. So it can be part of your article writing process, the last step before sending it off, have a listen to the entire paper. You know, at two times speed, it probably won't take that long to get through it and it will allow you to catch all those silly little mistakes that will really put off reviewers. If you like this video, remember to head over to here because it looks like that. It's the six AI tools that you must know about if you're doing any sort of research activity. Go check it out. So there we have it. Those are the hidden gems that I think you should know about if you are doing anything in research or even just want to sort of like get through the literature in a different and productive way. Let me know in the comments what you think about them and whether or not you'd use them as part of any sort of daily workflow while you're trying to get through that mountain of papers sat on your desk. Let me know. Also, remember there are more ways that you can engage with me. The first way is to sign up to my newsletter. Head over to andrewstapleton.com.au forward slash newsletter. The link is in the description. And when you sign up, you'll get five emails over about two weeks. Everything from the tools I've used, the podcast I've been on, how to write the perfect abstract and more. It's exclusive content available for free. So why not just go sign up now? And also head over to academiainsider.com. That's where I've got my projects, eBooks, the ultimate academic writing toolkit as well as the PhD survival guide. I've got my resource pack for applying for grad school and PhDs as well. And everything over there is to help you navigate academia and make it work for you. All right then, I'll see you in the next video.