Speech Central: Text-to-Speech 4+

Excellent app

I have always aspired to be a reader, but struggled to read. My work around was to use iPhone’s integrated text to speech accessibility function. What is helpful about this app is that it highlights the words as it reads so you can read along. This is similar to Microsoft’s Immersive Reader. I would suggest adding a couple features that are already integrated in Microsoft’s Immersive reader like more variety on the background colors that are easier on the eyes (Microsoft has a soft green that helps with the contrast between words).

Opportunities for improvement to the current functionalities:
1) User friendly integration of RSS feeds - the website following functionality is clunky and confusing. Look at how the RSS Reader App collects unread articles from your favorite sites and then you can click read more for the entire article. It would be niece to have that automation integrated into this app.
2) The most useful thing would be Smart scan camera integration. You can already input already scanned pdfs. But imagine being able to take a picture with your phone’s camera of a piece of physical paper for the app to be read to you. I currently use a third party scanner. But it would be nice to have it all integrated into the app.

Developer Response ,

Hi, first thank you for overall positive review. I understand that you may be a new user and still exploring the app so you will probably find more in the future, but at the moment I have to mention that stated facts aren’t correct. The app does have the dyslexic friendly font - somewhat interesting is that it is called exactly like that in the app though it is not its original name as the app tries to be user friendly. Second you can also change the background. Third, you can scan the page to read it. Finally I am not sure what would be more user friendly way to integrate rss feeds, but if you have some specific implementation on mind feel free to suggest it, I am quite open to improvements.

Finally

I’m so thankful that this app understands that text to speech software is an accessibility tool and not a cash grab. With that being said, I bought premium even though I definitely didn’t need it to use this app.

I usually use text to speech software on my pc, but I really also needed something portable that I could use with headphones. This app reads me PDFs in a decent voice. And some of the voices are a little rough but you can fix that by adjusting the pitch and speed. There are so many customizations that I was able to fine tune one of the free voices to sound really good.

I also love that it saves your progress so that you can click back into the app and open up a PDF and continue reading where you left off. The few glitches that have come up are fixed quickly because the developer really cares about this project. The one time I reached out because of an issue it was already being fixed.

Before this I was using the free iOS assessability feature for text to speech, but it usually stops reading a PDF halfway through the document and it’s a huge hassle to pick up where you left off. And then I’ve tried other apps, but it seems like everything else is very very very expensive, and has the same features as this app. Plus reading limits which as far as I’ve experienced this app doesn’t have.

This is my dream app at a really good price. I am so thankful that this app exists.

Perfect For Nerds Who Love Excercise

I love reading. I’ll pretty much read anything from articles to cereal boxes. I don’t know what it is, but I just love the process of gaining information anyway I can. Anyway, I also love to exercise. I go to the gym, I bike, I roller blade, I do everything short of palates.
Well, I wanted to read articles while I was biking, since audiobooks just weren’t cutting it. I found a really good article I wanted to read, that I think was about the anatomy of blue whales. Of course, you can’t read an article and bike at the same time... not safely anyway. So, I pulled up the App Store to see if their were any good text to speech apps. I went through several, before I decided on this one.
This is a very good app for me because I’m so fast paced and the read-along doesn’t go too slow. It goes at just the right pace I need to be able to listen and concentrate on the biking trail at the same time. Thank you so much for this awesome app!