Woord started in 2020 with a simple observation: the internet is written, but people increasingly want to listen. Today, over 500,000 people use Woord to turn articles, documents and ideas into audio that sounds human — and, since 2026, audio that sounds local.
Woord was born inside Zyla Labs as an online reader: paste any text or article link, press play, and listen. What began as a productivity trick quickly found a much more important audience — people with dyslexia and visual impairments, language learners, and students who simply learn better by listening. That accessibility DNA still drives every product decision we make.
We connected the best speech engines in the world and wrapped them in one simple interface. Premium neural voices, 45 languages and variations, OCR to read scanned documents and even photos of book pages, an SSML editor for fine control, and a Text-to-Speech API so developers could build with the same voices. Podcasters, teachers, marketers and publishers turned millions of words into audio.
The market split in two: beautiful reader apps that lock your audio inside their walls, and powerful studios that charge for every character you generate. We chose a third path — a reader with word-by-word highlighting where you download the MP3 and own it, with a commercial license and a flat, honest price. No annual traps. No daily caps.
Every text-to-speech product can do "General American". But your audience doesn't live in General America — they live in Texas and Boston, Glasgow and Newcastle, Sydney and Toronto. So we rebuilt Woord around 86 regional voices: real Southern drawls, Cockney wit, Aussie warmth, Québécois charm and many more countries and accents, all playable before you write a single word. It's the thing nobody else does — and the reason Woord sounds different.
A small team obsessed with making the written internet listenable — in every accent.