Voice Dream Reader 4+
Text to Speech
Voice Dream LLC
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- Free
- Offers In-App Purchases
Screenshots
Description
Voice Dream Reader lets you listen to PDF documents, Web articles, and eBooks using text-to-speech. Although it is designed for people with visual impairment, dyslexia, ADHD, and other reading challenges, everyone can benefit. Your documents become audiobooks, so you can read while you walk, exercise or do chores. For productivity-minded people, with some practice, you can read at twice your sight-reading speed. Unlike audiobooks, you can highlight, take notes, and see the words as they're spoken to improve comprehension and retention.
Voice Dream Reader for iOS is a 2021 Apple Design Award Winner, and it's been featured by Apple as Best New App and App of the Day in 81 countries. Using the award-winning iOS app as building blocks, we wrote Voice Dream Reader Desktop from ground up as a native macOS app with a completely redesigned user interface. The result is a full-featured, desktop-class application fully optimized for the Mac.
ACCOLADES
"Both experts recommend Voice Dream Reader as the best app in the text-to-speech space." - Wired
“This app is one of the best educational finds of my entire career.” - Forbes
“As a user myself and as a mother of a child with dyslexia, I am blown away by the features of Voice Dream.” - Quartz
FEATURES
Library
- Manage all your reading material in one place.
- Organize in folders. Search, filter and sort.
- Keep a Reading List so you never run out of things to read.
- Synchronize your library, reading locations, bookmarks and notes across all your Apple devices.
- Your library stays private on your device, or in iCloud Drive if you synchronize. No-one else has access.
Text-to-Speech
- 75 macOS text-to-speech voices in 27 languages.
- All Acapela voices in a language of your choice.
- All voices are offline to protect your privacy.
- Correct pronunciation with your own pronunciation rules.
- Save speech to audio files.
Document Formats
- PDF, plain text, and Google Docs.
- Text recognition for scanned PDF.
- Skip repeating headers and footers in PDF.
- Web articles via Safari Extension.
- Bookshare books via built-in interface.
- EPUB eBooks. (DRM-free books only. Kindle, iBooks and most commercial eBook platforms are encrypted.)
- DAISY text-based books and audiobooks.
- Audiobooks in MP3, MP4 or zipped MP3 format.
- Native access for Dropbox and Google Drive.
Reading Styles
- Highlight spoken word to improve comprehension and retention.
- Change font, colors, character and line spacing, and margins.
- Auto-scrolling and full screen, distraction-free mode to help with focus.
- Two speed-reading modes: Pac-Man and RSVP.
- Optimized for accessibility including VoiceOver.
- High contrast and large font size for low vision readers.
Studying Tools
- Bookmark, highlight and take notes.
- Export highlights and notes.
- Full-text search.
- Built-in dictionary.
Notes for iOS Users
- Ivona and NeoSpeech voices do not run on macOS.
- Pocket and Instapaper support is coming soon.
- Evernote does not support third party access on macOS.
SUBSCRIPTION
Voice Dream Reader Desktop requires a subscription, but we offer a 7-day free trial before you get charged, so you can find out if this app is right for you. The subscription is separate from Voice Dream Reader for iOS. Please visit our blog (http://www.voicedream.com/blog) to find out why this app requires a subscription.
Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
What’s New
Version 1.6.8
Fix bug with file syncing and also adds password reset in settings
Ratings and Reviews
4 Stars for subscription model
I am disappointed in the move to subscription model for the mac. I do hope this doesn't move over to iOS in the future.
That being said, the voices available for the mac are fantastic, and I am enjoying the larger screen and ease of highlighting.
I do have some recommendations that would make articles more enjoyable: Please allow me to drag and create a box that blocks out areas that I don't want read. For example, if my PDF article has many tables or figures that I don't want read, please allow some feature (similar to PDF margin finder) to box that figure or section out, and the voice reader just continues. This includes ability to box off authers or institutions in the begining as well as references at the end.
Incredible!
This is the best text-to-speech product I have ever used in my life. I have tried Natural Reader and Speechify, and others in the past. This product has a beautiful interface on the Mac. It feels like an Apple product. It syncs perfectly with my other devices. My favorite part is how great the OCR is and how it can identify margins even on mobile. The OCR with this product could successfully play text from a scanned PDF. I tried to use the same PDF on speechify, and it would randomly skip sentences it could not OCR. This product is by far superior. The ONLY negative is that the voices are not the best; however, I prefer the voice Evan (enhanced), which is already part of Mac and iOS, so external voice options do not matter. Also, the speed reading functionality is incredible. 10/10 is one of the best and the only apps I have not had immediate buyer's remorse after purchasing. Give it a try - you will be satisfied.
No longer working
Whereas I've used this app with much success in the past, a glitch has caused this app to be entirely unuseable for me. The reader will no longer stay on track.
I've listened to multiple books (novels, textbooks, books with many citations) in the past with very satisfactory results. The app was able to handle reading all the content on the page, though it sometimes struggled with small paragraphs on the margins of the pages.
But now, I am having issues where the app repeatedly plays from the same part of the book. Attempts to start the reading from places that I click are unsuccessful, instead the app insists on playing from the same starting point (a random point over 2 hours in the pdf). Attempts to rewind were unsuccessful. After rewinding for 15 minutes and attempting to start there, the app would jump back to the same wrong place as before.
After numerous tries, I was able to get the reader to begin reading about 5 minutes before the spot that I was intending. So I waited for it to line up and began listening. This was successful for about 2 minutes, before it inexplicably skipped over 15 minutes ahead without any clicks on my part.
I sincerely hope you can fix these issues as this app has otherwise been good to me in the past. But for the moment I am canceling my subscription on behalf of the app becoming unusable for my purposes.
App Privacy
The developer, Voice Dream LLC, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
- Usage Data
- Diagnostics
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Voice Dream LLC
- Size
- 59.9 MB
- Category
- Education
- Compatibility
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- Mac
- Requires macOS 11.0 or later.
- Languages
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English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish
- Age Rating
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2024 Voice Dream LLC
- Price
- Free
- In-App Purchases
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- Monthly Subscription $8.99
- Annual Subscription $49.99
- Monthly Subscription $9.99
- Annual Subscription $59.99
Supports
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Family Sharing
Some in‑app purchases, including subscriptions, may be shareable with your family group when Family Sharing is enabled.