Listening: read on the go 4+

Overall this app is pretty good. I’ve tried a couple of similar apps and the voices sounded really robotic, but this is very easy to listen to and I find I can pay attention like a proper recorded audiobook. The ability to easily report pronunciation errors is also great. It won’t fix it straight away, but over time the app will get better.

The main problem I’m having is it sometimes jumps around and becomes nonsensical. Seems like when it has scanned the page it’s jumbled the order of some of the lines. It also has trouble handling figures and tables smoothly, but I’ve checked the pdf and sometimes there isn’t anything that would account for the confusion in line order.

I started using this app to help me with grading student assignments because I get bad migraines. I just upload their pdfs and listen to them while reading along on to grade on a paper copy, then I can enter comments and grades later. I normally get migraines every semester when grading but this has saved my brain. Also helpful with literature reviews. The only criticism I have is I wish there were different voice options.

This is an interesting idea. The speed and potentials are great and it could provide great help to academics.
However, this is not a final product and it seems to have been rushed into the market. So when it demands pay, it is in effect asking us, the users, to fund the product development. This would have been somewhat acceptable if the product had the bare minimums required for an academic audio app, namely,
1- cross platform or at least cross device sync (the former is non existent and I think the same goes for the latter)
2- export capabilities that make sense for academics (lacking). At the moment it seems out notes marked as notes, without any reference to context. You can see the context on the app in terms of the name of the reference and the paragraph. This is already poor for academic work and adds to rather than reducing the workflow for academic note taking. But upon export, even that already poor contextual info (reference to text location) is lost.
3- reading is glitchy. In many instances it misreads simple words and expressions, let alone more complex, less familiar terms etc.
With these shortcomings, the app, in my opinion, is underdeveloped even as a prototype and therefore financialising it is premature.