ElevenLabs Reader: AI Audio 4+

Huge accessibility win

As a legally blind user this is a dream come true. Elevenlabs has by far the most natural sounding computer voices and to be able to paste in any text and have it read by my favorite voices is beyond compare. I interpret the phrase “any length of text” and “import epubs” as “be able to read books you couldn’t before.”
I’m still half in disbelief that this is some sort of bug and my usage limit will update in a few more hours but right now it seems like elevenlabs are going in on the side of valuing accessibility and I am in the target audience for that so I really really appreciate it ❤️

An amazing app if issues get fixed

As others have said, the app is excellent when it works doing exactly what you want it to with a nice interface. You can have any article or file read to you at the speed of your choice in an AI generated voice of your choice. Eleven labs AI readers sounds completely natural and high quality. If you leave off midway through and article you can simply return later and pick up where you left off while reading along if you like.

The problem is, it simply fails too often at present. I’ve used the app 7 times and it has not worked 3 of them. The text loads and the AI reader loads for the first 1-2 minutes then halts. Probably the server can’t handle the request, sometimes you get an error message sometimes you don’t but you’ll just have to try again in a few hours because it will not proceed.

If this issue gets fixed I would absolutely love the app and use it all the time. As is, I can’t use it because the convenience of having the article read to me as opposed to reading it is outweighed by the inconvenience of the unreliability that it will work. I’ve stopped using for now but will try again in a few months to see if the issue is handled.

Developer Response ,

Hey - thank you for the feedback. The playback problem should be now resolved.

Would be great if it worked

This was great while it worked —but it stopped working.

Perhaps it only works for short texts. It will begin reading longer texts, but will freeze and appear to be loading something that never arrives, even though the entire text is downloaded and visible. Are these growing pains? Are servers getting inundated with requests? Is there a hard limit on words, or time, or something else? It there a glitch that the next update will fix? There’s no warning, notice, or feedback, and there’s no way to set bookmarks to find where you were before it stopped working. For any long form content, that’s very frustrating — the user doesn’t want to sink a few hours into a text only to have the app freeze, without even having a way to restart from the right point. Please fix these problems - the promise of this app is great, and should not be lost to frustration with glitches.