Speech Central: Text to Speech 4+

Acouple of issues...

I'm an IT pro (All Apple since 1982) and for the past 3 decades a novelist as well. On my previous MBP I used GhostReader Plus with high quality voices from Acapela Group. Unfortunately, that program is discontinued and the version I have does not work properly in Ventura.

My question/complaint/issue is that GhostRead Pro understood the rules of punctuation, Speech Central: Text to Speech (S.C.T.S) has some issues in that area.

Comma’s seem to have a bit of a pause so I think they’re passably OK. Periods, Question Marks & Exclamation Points, not so much.

Periods represent a full stop: That is, a pause typically equal to the length of a full breath or a silent count of one or two. When reading aloud, that pause signals the end of a sentence. Unfortunately, S.C.T.S blows through periods faster than a teenager on a back county road.

For timing, Question Marks should have a pause similar to a period. Additionally, a rise in intonation indicates to the listener that a question has been asked.

Like periods, Exclamation points also indicate a pause in the reading and are sometimes accompanied by a change in tone to convey excitement or emphasis.

Not having these vocal cues can, and in a longer reading will, result in confusion for the listener. Listening is, after all, the reason for text to speech in the first place.

Other than those issues, the program seems pretty solid. If they get resolved, it’s a solid 5 stars in my book.

Great

One of the best text to speech apps I've used. My favorite feature is the little bar that follows the text (helps so much with concentration). My only complaints are 1) limited options for speech rate (1.5x,2x,3x etc instead of words per minute) and 2) doesn't allow you to copy and paste from the window to take notes in another app. I also wish the playback was a bit more exact. Instead of jumping to the next paragraph I wish it would have an option to replay the last sentence, or even let you click on a point in the paragraph for it to start at, rather than having to start the whole paragraph over.

Excellent program

I had several bugs upon the update, and I did email the developer, but they did not receive it. This program got me through undergrad and grad school. In the interim, most of these functions have actually started working just fine. I would say that the vast majority of things are better than the previous version. One issue I’m still having is bookmarks. I am making sure my documents have proper headings, but, there are no bookmarks coming through in the software. I am also having some trouble with some very large files. However, it’s very convenient that when I add more files, the app goes directly into the previous location that I had received the last file from. Overall it is excellent and I have many friends and family using it on my request.

Developer Response ,

I haven’t got any email. I use Apple’s iCloud servers for email and I read even the junk folder so it is likely that there was some error on your side. The app has added more than 1000 new features lately. It has removed up to 10 almost unused features.

As now the app uses the same code for iOS and macOS (using latest Apple’s technologies it can still fully used all specifics of each platform) there are more than 100,000 users with the active installation and no one complained regarding any problem with the PDF in more than two months (the only complaint was that OCR didn’t work on very large documents on the iPhone but that was resolved).

If you send some samples I will certainly check them, but the chances are that there is some problem on your side.