Reader

Saving something is only half of it. Reader is where you actually read what you saved — the articles you captured, the newsletters you forwarded, the videos you dropped in — and highlight the passages that land, right there on the page.

Open it from Reader in the sidebar, or at app.usebecoming.com/reader.

What’s in your queue

Reader holds everything Becoming has the full text of:

Articles you saved whole — from the extension, your phone’s Share menu, or Save a link.
Newsletters that arrived at your Becoming address.
Videos, read as their transcript alongside the player.
PDFs you imported, once their text has been pulled out.

Books aren’t here. A Kindle or Goodreads book comes in as highlights, not as a text Becoming can show you, so those live in your Library.

The screen is in three parts: Continue reading picks up whatever you had open, Up next is everything waiting, and Recently finished is what you’ve been through. Each row carries an estimate — 12 min, or 4 min left if you’re partway.

When there’s nothing left, Reader says so rather than showing you an empty list. New saves land there on their own as they arrive.

Reading and highlighting

Open anything in the queue and it fills the screen — no sidebar, no chrome, just the piece.

Select any passage to keep it. A small toolbar appears with:

Highlight — save the selection to your library, exactly as written.
Copy — put it on your clipboard without saving.

A highlight you make here is your own words-off-the-page, so it never costs an AI credit — the same as highlighting with the extension.

Everything you’ve kept from a piece sits in its highlights drawer, so you can see what you’ve marked without scrolling back for it.

Click a passage you’ve already highlighted and a small toolbar of icons appears beside it:

Copy — put the passage on your clipboard.
Share — make an image card of it, or copy its text. See Sharing a Highlight.
Delete — remove the highlight. Becoming asks first.

Click anywhere else, or press Escape, to put the toolbar away. On a video, clicking a line of the transcript still jumps the video there.

On a video

A video plays at the top with its transcript below. Click any line to jump the video there, and use Jump to now to bring the transcript back to whatever’s playing. Turn on Auto-scroll transcript and it follows along on its own.

A highlight you take from a transcript keeps the moment it came from.

Listen to an article

Reader can read a piece aloud to you, on the web and in the Becoming app for iPhone and Android: an article, a newsletter, or a PDF. In the app it reads a video’s transcript too; on the web, videos aren’t read aloud yet.

Start with Listen, the play button at the top of the page. Reading starts at the paragraph on your screen rather than back at the top, and the sentence being read is marked as it goes, with the page scrolling to follow it. The mark only shows your place; it doesn’t save anything. Scroll off to look at something else and Return to sentence takes you back to it, or Play here carries on from the text in the middle of the screen. To start at a particular spot, select a passage and choose Play from here.

The player at the bottom of the screen has:

Play and Pause.
Previous sentence and Next sentence, to go back or skip ahead.
The speed button, from 0.75× up to 2×.
Save sentence, which keeps the sentence being read as a highlight in your library, just as if you’d selected it. Like any highlight you make yourself, it never costs an AI credit.

To stop, close the player, or use Stop listening where Listen was.

In the app, it keeps playing with the screen locked, so the phone can go in your pocket, and the lock screen has the controls. On the web, your keyboard’s media keys and your browser’s media controls play, pause and skip sentences.

Listening works for pieces in English and Spanish. If a piece is in another language, Reader tells you it can’t read that one aloud yet.

Listening time

Listening has its own monthly allowance, separate from AI credits, so it never uses any up. Only new audio counts: listening again to something you’ve already heard is free. The allowance resets on the 1st, and unused time doesn’t carry over. How much each plan includes is on Plans & Billing, and Listening in Settings shows how much you have left.

If your time runs out, audio that’s already been made keeps playing. New audio waits for the reset, or, on a trial, for a plan.

Finishing, and putting things away

Reading to the end marks a piece Read and moves it to Recently finished — you don’t have to do anything. You can also set it yourself:

Mark as read.
Want to read — on a piece you’ve finished, puts it back in the queue to read again from the top.
Archive — take it out of the queue without deleting it. Unarchive puts it back.

Archiving keeps the source and every highlight on it. It only clears the queue.

These are the same shelves your library shows on every source — Want to read, Reading, Read and Archived. Opening a piece and getting partway puts it on Reading; finishing it, or marking it read, puts it on Read. See Browsing your library.

Display

Display adjusts how the page reads, and remembers what you choose:

Text size.
Dark mode, for reading at night.
Auto-scroll transcript, on videos.

Two things you might notice

“We don’t have the full content for this source, so only its highlights are shown.” Some sources arrive as highlights without a body — a Kindle book, or a web page you saved by selecting a passage rather than the whole page. There’s nothing to read, so Reader skips the reading view.

“3 highlights aren’t in this text — kept, not lost.” A passage that can’t be found in the page is called out rather than dropped — the quote may have been paraphrased when it was extracted, or the page may have changed since you saved it. The highlight is kept either way; it just can’t be underlined in place.