Cliff Weitzman

From a young age, Cliff was an extremely bright and outgoing child. He dreamed big, too, wanting to become a pop star, a scientist, a billionaire, or even the Prime Minister of Israel when he grew up. But he also knew early on that to make such big dreams come true, he would need to read a lot. There was just one problem…he had trouble reading. Getting through even a few words on a page was an enormous struggle, and even his teachers and parents took a while to realize Cliff would only pretend to read while running his finger under words on a page. Cliff’s dad tried everything he knew to get Cliff to read. No matter what they tried, making sense of written words for him seemed no use.

Finally in third grade, Cliff got the answer he had been looking for his whole life—he had dyslexia. Now, everything made sense. His parents changed their perspective, too, especially his dad. He would read Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone to Cliff every night he could and left a recorded cassette tape of him reading the book when he couldn’t read it in person. Once Cliff later discovered audiobooks, he would go through as many as he could, getting through 100 books a year. Even when Cliff’s family moved to the U.S., he didn’t let his dyslexia stop him from learning English, absorbing as many books as he could through audio, and graduating high school with an over 4.0 GPA.

The next obstacle would be college. Cliff applied to as many Ivy League schools as he could, trying his absolute best to prove his smarts despite having dyslexia in his application essays. He was accepted to Brown University, which set him on his entrepreneurial path. It was even thanks to Brown that Cliff started tampering with text-to-speech in order to finish reading his summer reading book on the flight to his first semester in college. At Brown, Cliff taught himself how to code and even created his own degree program in Renewable Energy Innovation, where he studied computer science, engineering, and physics. He also spent time inventing 40 different products in college including iPhone apps, websites, and payment companies.

When Cliff’s time to graduate from Brown in 2016 came, he knew what he wanted to do next—help other people just like him. That’s when he started his work on Speechify. But Cliff didn’t just want to create another bare-bones text-to-speech app like the ones that already existed. He wanted to make something even better, something that would truly change lives. What started out as a goal to help other children and adults with dyslexia transformed into an even more ambitious mission of creating the ultimate accessibility tool for people with dyslexia, ADHD, learning disabilities, visual impairments, brain injuries, and other conditions that make reading difficult, along with people learning a new language.

Speechify makes reading more accessible to all sorts of people thanks to its versatility, ease of use, and lifelike voices. It even gained immense popularity among people without reading difficulties who simply wanted to improve their multitasking. With Cliff’s passion for technology, Speechify began to break even more barriers in text-to-speech, AI voice generation, and other assistive AI spheres. Industry-leading features and tools continue to be added like optical character recognition, more than a hundred customizable natural-sounding voices, dozens of languages, and much more. With Cliff’s guidance, Speechify has become the go-to place for people who want to improve their reading, multitasking, and productivity.

Today, Cliff has helped millions of people around the world overcome their reading struggles and fall in love with reading again through Speechify. He took his own struggles with dyslexia and learning English as a second language, infused them with his passion for learning and technology, and created a powerhouse of accessibility and AI tools. Cliff’s story proves that a person’s setbacks can become their greatest strength and a world-changing force for good. With Speechify, he hopes that many others just like him can now overcome their obstacles and believe that they too have the ability to make the same difference.