Every CFP lesson on FreeFellow now has narrated audio. That's all 71 lessons, about 25 hours of listening in total. The voice is AI-narrated.
I built it for the study time that doesn't happen at a desk. A lot of candidates have a commute, a walk or a lunch break they'd use for studying if they didn't have to stare at a phone to do it. A lesson is where you learn a topic in the first place, and until now you had to read it. Now you can put in headphones, press play and get through a lesson with your phone in your pocket.
How the narration is written
The easy version would have been to feed each lesson page into a text-to-speech voice and call it done. The trouble is that a lesson page doesn't survive being read straight out loud. A heading comes out as a sentence fragment with no pause around it. A bulleted list runs together into one long sentence. A formula turns into a string of symbols, and a calculator keystroke table is close to unlistenable.
So each lesson has its own script, written to be heard. It starts by saying the lesson title, so you know where you are when you start one without looking. Headings become spoken transitions, so you can hear when the topic changes. Lists get counted out loud, so you know how many items are coming and when the last one is done. Formulas and calculator steps are read as value, key and meaning: the number you enter, the key you press, and what that number stands for in the problem.
Listening has one real drawback compared with reading. On the page you can see what's bolded or boxed, and in your ears everything sounds the same. To make up for that, one soft bell plays before a key point and two bells play before an exam trap. When you hear two, the next thing is a spot where candidates tend to lose points.
Using the player
Each lesson plays section by section, in order. The heading being read is highlighted on the page, so if you glance down you can see where you are. Tapping a heading jumps the audio to that section, which is also the quickest way to go back and hear a calculation again.
There's a speed control, and it remembers your setting, so if you like it faster you only set it once. The audio keeps playing when your phone locks, with controls on the lock screen, so you can pause it on a walk or a commute without unlocking anything.
Now and then the narration will say something the wrong way. If a term is mispronounced, a number is read wrong, or a sentence doesn't match the lesson, tap Report a problem on the player. That comes straight to me and I fix it. Audio reports earn contributor points the same way other reports do.
CFP is the first exam with audio. I'm narrating more exams now.
Lesson audio is part of Fellow Plus. For the launch, it's free through October 31, 2026 for anyone with a FreeFellow account. The written lessons stay free to read either way, along with the rest of the free CFP resources. After October 31, Fellow Plus includes audio, and you can also unlock it with contributor points: 100 points gets you 30 days of audio on one exam.