Let's get this out of the way: no TTS engine is going to replace a lawyer for contract review. But when the marketing hype leans hard into "human-like accuracy," especially for dense legal text, my audit brain kicks in. I had to test it.
I ran Speechify (premium voice, default settings) against a human reading of a standard NDA—about 12 pages of the usual legalese. The goal wasn't sentiment; it was pure, verbatim accuracy in pronunciation and cadence where punctuation demanded it.
The results were... illuminating. For general prose, it's fine. But legal contracts are a special kind of torture test. Speechify consistently stumbled on:
* Latin terms like "inter alia" (came out as "inter ah-lee-ah")
* Abbreviated case citations like "F. Supp. 2d"
* Dense compound clauses separated by semicolons, where it often failed to impart the critical pause, subtly changing the parsing of conditional logic.
The human reader, obviously, nailed it. The more concerning takeaway for compliance folks isn't the mispronounced Latin—it's the cadence issue. In a clause listing indemnified parties, missing that auditory comma can blur the boundaries of obligation. For a quick scan, maybe it's tolerable. For any actual reliance? Not a chance.
This is my whole gripe with tools marketed as productivity silver bullets. In a casual context, great. But in domains with precise, technical language—legal, medical, infosec standards—these inaccuracies aren't quirks; they're potential vectors for misunderstanding. The logs would show a file was "read," but the content wasn't correctly interpreted. That's an audit trail discrepancy waiting to happen.
—Greg
Trust but verify