Description of App
Feature set that exceeds the competition, no subscription for the premium tier with the free tier that is limited by the quantity, not by the quality, that is the reason why you'll love Speech Central. Here are just some of our outstanding features:
◦ The best text-to-speech experience - our proprietary engine significantly enhances the output of Apple's voices and AI voices (OpenAI, Azure, Google) by infusing their readings with emotion and variation.
◦ The best PDF support in text to speech apps - your reading flow will not be interrupted by footers, headers, footnotes, in text citations and long web links as they are detected by the advanced artificial intelligence in most cases. Even the scanned PDF documents are imported with titles recognised.
◦ The best web support in text to speech apps - for the first time you can listen everything as both articles and headlines (including RSS feeds) are supported. Articles can be added from the headlines page for fully uninterrupted flow or from Safari. And you can send articles from the desktop browser with the Pocket extension.
◦ The widest support for documents/office and e-book formats.
◦ CarPlay support.
◦ Knowledge and text annotation tools built-in.
◦ Import the text from the physical books with the camera.
◦ The widest choice of options to customize the voice, appearance and various other parameters.
◦ Sync playlist items across Apple devices including the macOS app and the current position in the text.
◦ Apple Watch app that can play the content independently of the main app.
◦ Export the text with annotations to the .docx format.
◦ Customize functions of audio buttons. The widest selection of tools to control the speed and browse the text that is read aloud.
◦ The app can be used with dozens of languages that have text-to-speech support on the device with automatic language detection from the content.
◦ Export the text to the audio file.
◦ The best in class accessibility. It is completely free when used with VoiceOver and tested to be accessible by legally blind users.
◦ Your data stays truly private, we collect only analytics data with no identifiable reference to the user or imported content even when the syncing is enabled.
◦ Track the Mindfulness time in the Health app
The app is installed on over 250,000 devices and with consistent ratings above 4 stars Speech Central it is one of the leading global text-to-speech brands. It was nominated for the best iOS accessible app in 2020 and 2017 on AppleVis, the leading authority in the field of accessibility on Apple devices.
By moving your reading activities to commuting, walking, running, doing the housework or another activity you can save an hour each day. You'll also save eyes for better things while having your battery and data plan last significantly longer. Keeping the screen off grants that you won't get into the internet addiction and waste your time on unwanted things, and thus it can also help people with ADHD.
The app can be used as an assistive technology and helper for people with visual impairments (eyesight problems) and disabilities like dyslexia.
Supported document types are: PDF (including scanned documents), Microsoft Word (.docx), Microsoft PowerPoint (.pptx), OpenOffice/LibreOffice (.odt, .odp), .html, .mhtml, .webarchive, .txt, .rtf. E-books in the .epub format are supported.
Get the app now and enjoy the most convenient text to audio!
Notes:
- The free version has a daily limitation in the number of articles that you can add to it which is removed by purchasing the Pro add-on.
- Some features are available only on the latest version of the operating system.
- The license is valid only for the iOS/watchOS. Other operating systems have separate licenses.
- DRM protected books (e.g. Kindle books) are locked to their respective vendor apps and cannot be imported into the app.
- AI based features may not work as expected in minority of cases
Comments
What types of voices?
What TTS voices does it use? Are they any good?
Re: hat types of voices?
Hello,
It uses whatever voice your system has.
Hope this helps!
Thanks
Thanks for the response.
Find feature is inaccessible, and listing chapters in TXT file
Hello,
please, would it be possible to make the Find feature which lets the user search a text in the content of an opened book accessible with VoiceOver? It would be great if the feature, instead of the current implementation, displayed a list of found items where each item would contain a snippet of the text the search term was found inside. Then double-tapping on some item would move the reading position to that occurrence in the book and started playing. Basically, to make it work as in Voice Dream Reader.
The main reason why this could be helpful is that plain text e-books in TXT format typically use some symbols, such as "#" or "X" to denote chapters, and therefore by searching those symbols, one can get a list of chapters. in the book. Or perhaps even better, this feature for listing chapters in TXT file could be separate from the Find feature., so that one could use both the Find and Chapters list feature independently. In any way it would be nice to make the find feature accessible in the first place, similarly as I described.
Best regards
Adam
RE: Find feature is inaccessible, and listing chapters in TXT fi
I did have a plan to add the "Find All" feature in the future which works as you have described, so I'll put it at a higher priority. This was inspired more by apps like Microsoft Word and Adobe Reader though I guess it works in a similar way in all apps that have this feature.
But I think that there might be also better ways to support what you have suggested (titles in txt books). Can you provide some samples to me? If those are copyrighted and can't be sent in full then please just send some samples of those titles.
Example of denoting chapters in TXT e-books
I don't have any TXT e-book in English which uses such markup. But here is a simple example how it may look like:
# This is the book title
## Introduction
Here could be some paragraph with the introduction about this book.
## How I went to America.
In this chapter, the author may write about his trip to `America. Some very intersting text could be here.
A new paragraph starts here just to demonstrate this example.
## Conclusion
This is the end of this example. I guess no more nonsense is needed to demonstrate my point.
Missing button functions for Find next and Find previous
Hello Labsii,
if the "Find next" and "Find previous" functions, that is the possibility to move to the next or previous search occurrence in the book content, were available for custom assignment to buttons in settings, it could also easily solve the problem of navigating by chapter names in a TXT e-book, as described above.
Please, what do you think about this feature?
Re: Example of denoting chapters in TXT e-books
Adam, I have implemented a function based on your description that should display titles from TXT files in the regular Titles section in Navigation panel. It would be great if you could text if it works as I don't have a file to test.
Displaying titles in text documents not working
Hello Labsii,
I have created a simple plain text file with the example contents which I posted in one of my previous comment here, that is, denoting chapters with the # (hash) symbol, but if I display the titles for this text file as you instructed, there is only an empty list. Therefore, How I am supposed to display the list of such chapters? It would be also good to have an option per document to specify which symbol is used for denoting chapters because every e-book uses a different symbol.
Anyway, thanks for implementing this feature. I believe it would be a great addition to Speech Central, something which I quite miss in the Voice Dream Reader app.
Re: Displaying titles in text documents not working
Hello Adam,
This sample clearly won't work as it is artificial material that largely misses usual statistics/ratios of the book that are used in the detection. If you have some real sample please check it.
Unfortunately this isn't such a wide spread use case that I would add a setting for it. However I can further improve it based on the feedback.
Re 2: Displaying titles in text documents not working
Could you please explain in other words why this sample is not working?
Actually, I don't have any sample for this function. THe books which I use denote chapters not by the "#" (hash) sign, but using the "X" letter followed by space. It would be nice if user could choose at least between those two characters.
RE:
The book shouldn't have more titles than the text.
As this is based on guesses there are always chances of both false positives and false negatives. There are some rules to ensure that false positives are minimized and they can't pass on this sample.
Re 4: Displaying titles in text documents not working
I see. So could you please modify the function to recognise as title the "X" letter instead of "#" (hash) symbol so I can test it?
RE:
Adam,
technically it can be done, currently it was set to two characters that I would expect to appear "*" and "#".
However I am not sure if this particular implementation will have the future - I made it with assumption that it is something fairly common in .txt books. While I still have just an assumption now that assumption is opposite. At this point I am more likely into removing this code and implementing Find All feature (which would be implemented anyway sometimes later).
Next/previous sentence swipe navigation not working
Hello,
in settings > Button functions, for both Books and articles and Headlines, I have configured the Rewind and Forward buttons to navigate to the previous and next sentence, respectively. However, when I move the VoiceOver cursor to the Play/Pause button and swipe up or down, the reading position does not move by sentence but probably by 30 or 60 seconds. Please, how can I configure Voice Reader Speech Central to let me navigate to the next or previous sentence by swiping down or up on the Play/Pause button?
Thanks in advance.
RE: swipe navigation
Hello Adam,
thank you for your comment.
Currently the app is designed this way, but I do agree that your suggestion would be a welcome improvement.
I am not sure when this change will be exactly published - as the app is rewritten from the scratch every change to the current app is something that will be discarded in the near feature (likely by the end of the year). Still there might be few maintenance versions by then and as this change isn't too complicated it might appear even before that.
Re 2: Swipe navigation
Thanks for the quick reply.
this would be definitely a welcomed feature. Since Voice Dream Reader has turned to the subscription model, many users are now searching for a replacement book reading app, but this lacking feature is what blocks me from using Voice Reader Speech Central, and from recommending it to other users.
Re: swipe navigation
I understand your concerns.
I can say that all of those things are being worked on. For example, you have requested for the accessible Find feature. That is also already implemented in the next big version. The same is for this feature, I have immediately checked and implemented it for the next big version.
However the next big version will be result of full year of work and maybe even more and it isn't trivial or easy to estimate when it will be released. Many functions and even many improvements are already implemented. But as many basic necessary functionalities aren't even started this isn't fully functional yet.
I do hope for the November release, soon after Apple publishes the next version of macOS.
AI voices
Hi
I’m using Speech Central on the iPhone and Mac, and I really like the app. I can select the voices I want, but I can only choose the ones that are on my iPhone. I recently read that it’s possible to add AI voices, but I can’t find that option.
Does anyone know how I can do that?
Thanks
Help Article
There is the answer for that in the Help article (for Microsoft AI voices):
https://speechcentral.net/ios-help/#azure
I haven't included articles for other AI voices as users should examine them more carefully regarding their pricing and terms (Microsoft AI has a free tier where you won't be charged anything unless you explicitly change to the paid tier). But technically it is the same you need to obtain their API key which requires couple of steps that you can find with internet search.
To the developer
When I try to find to text in the app I often get no result although I am sure I typed the searched term and the term does exist in the document.
Another thing is the issue with the titles and chapters. I rarely find the app successful in parsing the titles and chapters correctly. For example,, I import a book and I want to see list of chapters I get one title which is often number 1. When I switch to title it shows me also nothing. If it happens and one book content is rendered correctly, I select a chapter to move to but the app does not seem to move to the title I picked from the list.
P.S.: this is on both Mac and iPad.
Using with Voice Over
I would like to know if someone can tell me what extra functionality this app brings to me as a Voiceover user, both on IOS and on Mac. At face value, I can't determine what my advantage would be with this app, as good as it may be. Thanks!
@Doug Green
It is a book reading app and it has great accessiblity. There are some issues with the app, yet they are not showstoppers for me. One good thing is the cross-platform compatibility, so I can read my book on my iPad and my position in the book is synced on both my Mac and my iPhone.