Architecture for playing a document converted into an audio format to a user of an audio-output capable device. The user can interact with the device to control play of the audio document such as pause, rewind, forward, etc. In more robust implementation, the audio-output capable device is a mobile device (e.g., cell phone) having a microphone for processing voice input. Voice commands can then be input to control play (“reading”) of the document audio file to pause, rewind, read paragraph, read next chapter, fast forward, etc. A communications server (e.g., email, attachments to email, etc.) transcodes text-based document content into an audio format by leveraging a text-to-speech (TTS) engine. The transcoded audio files are then transferred to mobile devices through viable transmission channels. Users can then play the audio-formatted document while freeing hand and eye usage for other tasks.