Speechify – Text to Speech Ratings and Reviews

Beware Monthly Word Limit

While this a good service and app, things could definitely be improved. My biggest qualm so far is that there is a monthly word limit at which point you are unable to use most of the voice options and are stuck with a robotic sounding woman’s name. I listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts while I work or multitask and so I was excited to use Speechify to listen to books that do not have Audiobook companions, pdfs, and online content. Within about two weeks I hit the monthly word limit and am now unable to really use the service because the non-enhanced/premium voice option is not very good.

Secondly, while this service does have a broad range of voices in English some are better than others in terms of sounding less robotic or monotone when reading aloud and so there are really only four or five that I found myself using regularly. Some of the voices sound more natural and are good with pacing and understanding how to read a document and others not so much. For example, occasionally a word or two will be skipped by the voice or a part of a document will be read more literally than it is meant to. For example, when “….” is used to imply a pause the voices are likely to pronounce “dot dot dot” at the same speed and pacing as the rest of a document or e-book.

I will wait and see what if any improvements are made to the service to determine if I will keep paying for it once the renewal date comes up.

Audible or Speechify?

I spent hours comparing text to speech apps, and by far, Speechify has some of the best premium HD voices. I even considered dropping Audible, so that I could pay for an unlimited amount of HD voice listening time; however, while the HD voices are great, they’re not reliable enough for me to consider them as a replacement for Audible just yet. At times, they’re slow to load or glitchy. I wasted a good 200 or so words listening to Gwyneth lisp her way through sentences as if she was lapsing into a different language. I fiddled with her speech rate trying to remedy the problem, but it was to no avail. I had to switch to Michael. Michael read through everything perfectly, but he too had trouble staying on task. Even though I had plenty of of HD listening words left, he would intermittently cut out and be replaced by the British Male speaking voice. With all things considered, this is an app worthy of downloading. It does a respectable job transferring words from pictures—better than most. Sometimes, to my astonishment, it can read my handwriting. It hasn’t crashed, and apart from the HD voices, the standard voices seem quite reliable. I like that I can earn HD words the more I listen, and that there’s enough to stay entertained with in the free version. With a bit more perfecting, Audible might find itself facing the boot in favor of this nifty little app. For now, Audible is safe from the chopping block.

Developer Response ,

Hey Manxiepoo! Thanks so much for sharing your Speechify experience. We've received reports of the Gwyneth and Narrator voices skipping words or changing into different languages. We've already reported this to our Devs Team for a review and fix. The fix wouldn't be anytime soon but we'll keep you updated once it's out. In the meantime, please choose the other HD voices. Please reach out to us via your app messaging and we're happy to refill the lost HD words due to the Gwyneth voice issue.

I love speechify

Gonna be honest. I have only ever listened to fanfiction read to me off ao3. The amount of fanfiction I have listened to in the past two years with this app is staggering and probably not healthy. But I work a job where I have to wear a head set to protect my hearing and listening to music gets boring after listening to the same stuff for so long. So, yes, sometimes the AI lady pronounces something silly or wrong and sometimes formatting an author will do on a piece can screw with the AI but honestly nothing has bothered me enough to stop using it and I don’t exactly have a lot of patience with stuff that doesn’t work. If you have a link to a pdf of literally anything it’ll read it to you and you can even turn your phone off while it does. The ONLY and I mean ONLY issue I have with speechify is it drains your battery TERRIBLY. When I originally started using this app I had an older iPhone 12 and whewww it just did not last I had my phone constantly on charge. I have a new iPhone 15 now and though it still does drain the battery it’s not as quick but my phone still ends up on the charger before I leave work. Not to end this on a bad note, I recommend speechify to anyone I know who talks about how they don’t have time to read or has trouble with sitting and reading something. It’s genuinely exactly what I was looking for in a read-it-to-me app! I highly recommend!!

Awesome

I too have dyslexia. And I hated school for this reason. I couldn’t read stuff like my friends. I was always behind. I took so long to do homework because of it I couldn’t go out and play with my friends. I hated it. I cried and fought with my mom a lot. They put me in a special reading class to try to teach me how to turn the letters and words around. I even reverse numbers sometimes. When I was in first grade I had a teacher who would yell at me for not being able to read instead of trying to help me. So my parents held me back and put me in a different school. Where the teacher had seen it before and knew the signs for dyslexia. And I was tested and found out that’s what it was. I appreciate so much you creating this app. I do wish it didn’t cost so much. I understand you have to pay for the development and to keep it up to date. But that is a lot. I did teach myself to read and I do read books. But it does take me a lot longer than everyone else because of the dyslexia. But I do it anyway and even enjoy reading now. When I was a kid you would never see me read. But again thanks for creating an app that helps with that. I just wish the cost was lower I can’t afford that much a year at one time. Or if you had smaller monthly costs too that would be better for someone like me. Thanks again. I will use the free version for now. 👍🏻

Developer Response ,

Thanks for sharing your story! Your concern about the pricing is valid. The cost is actually to support the creation and maintenance of all our premium voices, they cost a lot really. You can use the non-HD voices for free but making the HD voices has a lot of server costs. The annual subscription of $140 comes to $11.66/mo which is actually really cheap ($2.7/wk) - that’s less than the price of a textbook, less than one coffee a week.

Please feel free to use the app as a free user! 😊 If you have any other questions, drop us a message via "Message us" from your Speechify app. We're happy to help. By the way, thanks for the 5 stars! ❤️

WOW!

So helpful with ADHD. It tells you how many minutes it’ll take to read, taking away SO much of the intimidation I get from having to read anything. Pause at any time. It highlights the full sentence it’s on and follows along word-by-word “double highlighted.” It allows for dark mode. Love that for my light sensitivity! Tap the word you want it to start reading at if you’re skipping around. It’ll do exactly what you ask it to do. I wasn’t expecting it to be so good. I scanned two pages of my textbook. It even got the fine print and didn’t skip around to different paragraphs in a dumb way—even though the margins and pictures are designed in an awful way even for a human to read (thanks, dear engineers too cheap or stupid to hire real graphic designers with typography skills). It even read “g/mm^3” as “grams per cubic millimeter,” not “g slash m m carrot 3.” To top it off, the voice isn’t entirely annoying. The best automated voice imo, and believe me I’ve tried a ton. Maybe you can change the voice, but idk bc I just started playing with the app. Now I’m writing this review when I should be reading my textbook. Anyway, go ahead and download this app if you’re even on this page considering it—which ofc you are if you’re reading this rn. Good day.

Edit—a few minutes later 🙃: Yes, you can change the voice. There are MANY to choose from! Excited to try them.

No LIE

That’s the absolute truth I’ve had severe ADHD and as you get older… i’m a 55 year-old still teaching part-time teacher… And it’s very hard for me to read because I’m 25 steps ahead now I’m naturally 100% auditory/visual learner… I’ve been an artist since I was four years old prodigy… And I’m not bragging, but Dev this program you can process and I write now to professionally… Can you believe that I barely graduated high school because my reading comprehension was terrible… Actually, my high school as well as many other Towson like Raven high school very myopic in the administration in the upper levels extremely poor… Baltimore at that time had one of the worst reading scores, but as Einstein says books are a mass production to scheme…. He was terrible at math, but love physics and you think I’m to see three dimensions just like my Angelo… And many other great people who have studied in the 3D world…. of the mindset that all of us have the ability to leave our monkey mind sets behind completely once we hit about 20% of our brain usage. It’s like magic… The government in the military knows this and they are keeping us in a state of war and they are trying to keep the world and this is not just the US. This is everybody…. and entrance and vines these we don’t need in sleeves just sitting behind the desk all day long….. anyway check out Stephen Greer, Dr. Stephen Greer.

Developer Response ,

Glad you like it! :)

Worlds greatest App

I just wish I had Speechify when I was a young girl I found out I was dyslexic when I was taking eighth grade over for the second time. They knew I couldn’t comprehend they knew I could read but the problem was I wasn’t retaining it and it was extremely difficult but their practice and wanted to show that I’m not stupid even though I was in special ed classes as well I started reading more and more and more two books at the same time then I got up to three books at the same time finishing them and just expanding my mind today because I was not in school and work you’re on a computer I’ve kind of gone backwards but I’m trying again I’m back in college and 53 years of age to get a bachelors degree not in my first choice and love but it nonetheless it is still business and I look forward to this the only problem I have is the price that needs to come down so that more people can use it because I’m doing the three day trial but I will not be able to afford the price of the whole program if I can get it together I will but anyone that reads this it’s a great app and it does work and for those children that need the help it’s worth of money and it’s worth the money for me I just cannot afford it on a fixed income thank you and God bless.

Audio Book Listening

I want to start off saying I’ve only used this app to listen to two audio books, I have not used the other features and from what I hear it sounds like the other features work fine. But, I don’t think I can muscle through using this app for another audio book ever again, and to be fair I’m probably not the target audience of the app in the first place. -Frequent app crashes. Frequent. -When pausing an audio book and opening the app later, the app regularly jumps to another paragraph in the chapter or ahead a couple of chapters. Sometimes I’d pause it for fun and hit play right after to see how many words or sentences it decided to skip. -I found that if my iphone is in low power mode, the audio will completely stop playing after a couple minutes and I have go back into the app to hit the play button, which then almost always jumps the audio reading to another section (see issue before). -Tapping the forward or reverse buttons, in other audio book apps (I know this isn’t an “audio book app”) this allows the listener to jump ahead or behind a few seconds, not this app. Sometimes it feels like jumping to a paragraph behind or ahead. Maybe it takes you to the beginning of the sentence. Sometimes it will just jump an entire chapter of the book. Once it restarted the book entirely; that filled me with an emotion I thought I had experienced before but after this experience I realized I had never truly tapped into the full potential of this emotion.

Developer Response ,

Hi there, We are sorry for the trouble and appreciate you bringing this issue to our attention. This is not the expected behavior of the app. Could you uninstall/reinstall the app and make sure your iOS uses the latest version? You can also reach out to us at help@speechify.com.

Word limits!!

I originally was planning to give a 5 star review. I had previously been using a horrible text to voice app that sounds like the free voice in this app, but I listen to some lengthy texts when driving, working, cleaning ect. I had adored this app. Once you find the voice that best suits you (the premium voices) it would read it very naturally other then the few miss pronunciation which you can easily catch.

Here were my issues with this app though. It doesn’t charge you monthly. I initially wanted to test the app out since I had a previous one that I was still using, I DID like this app but I was horrified to see how much I was charged in one sitting after going past my trial period and had paid around $120 for a whole year. I would’ve preferred to pay month to month but what can you do…
Additionally, I had recently increased my volume of reading drastically to then find there is a word limit!! I am floored. In the middle of my listening it had cut to the worst robotic voice which was one of six “free” voices. To think I paid so much for a text to speech app just to get throttled.
Once I had contacted customer service their response was to give me 50k more words (mind you that had only lasted me under 2 hours of listening) and they also said they are in the works to create a premium with the option of more words/ unlimited words. So I’m gonna have to pay even MORE?? I’m not sure if it’s just me but I find this absolutely crazy

Promising app but disastrous updates hinder performance

This is a really promising application but unfortunately the last several updates have damaged the functionality. Early versions of the app stored files on your phone and downloading them was lighting fast and when you opened your app later to finish reading your downloaded files they were instantly there for you to read. A few updates ago the application was changed so that files you download now sync with servers in an attempt to allow you to view your files across the Chrome app (this is what the devs explained to me when I pointed out the new updates’ problem), however this syncing requirement means when you open the app it takes absolutely ages for your files to load, sometimes over an hour. I have not cancelled my premium subscription yet because I know this app can function better, because it used to prior to the damaging updates. I communicated these concerns to the developers and I’m patiently awaiting the next update to see if this issue is addressed. But since these new updates I’ve had a really hard time using the app and I’ve been searching for a replacement that doesn’t have these issues.

UPDATE: I have cancelled my subscription as the app experience continues to get worse. My saved files now mostly won’t sync and are thus not accessible usually for about 15 minutes after the app loads. This server sync delay is unacceptable in a subscription product