Designing and building the desktop apps for the world's biggest text to speech product
Speechify is the number one text to speech app in the world by customers and time listened, with people listening to over a billion words every month. I lead the Mac and Windows apps end to end: I design the experience and I write the production code.
- Role
- Senior Product Designer & Engineer
- Timeline
- 4+ years
- Scope
- Product design, Engineering, Monetization, Design system
The challenge
A powerful engine that people had to think about before using.
Speechify's technology was never the problem. The problem was everything around it. A text to speech engine only becomes a habit when it disappears into the day, and on desktop it did not. Performance, offline behaviour, keyboard flow, the moments between opening the app and hearing the first word. Those are the details most teams skip because none of them show up in a feature list.
What I did
Own both sides, so nothing gets lost between the design and the build.
I design the experience and then write the production code alongside the engineering team, rather than handing over mockups and walking away. Owning both halves means the apps ship faster, feel more coherent, and stay true to the original intent from first sketch to released build. To stay grounded I run interviews with readers, students and professionals, and pair that with analytics and A/B testing in Amplitude to refine the flows that actually move engagement and conversion.
Earlier at Speechify I led design for Speechify Studio, the browser based platform for AI voice generation, dubbing, avatars and voice cloning, and shaped the Chrome extension and web dashboard.