Leave a Review Voice Dream
Robotic - 2 issues to consider….
I’m short, I’m not certain this is better than any free tool bungled in most programs or Apps these days. Listening to the quick start gives you an idea of how poor the quality of speech is. Second issue I received an email offer after viewing the app ie reduced slightly so I paid only to find that I can not login or get going even though I have created an account without paying for the years subscription. I am promoted to sign up for a free trial via the screen that is offered. I have emailed support and received a reply …. Just log in with your email …. Not helpful thus my review here. If it gets sorted out or I get a refund then I will update my review.Show lessmrpauly
“Free” voices aren’t free
I think it’s pretty disingenuous to say “36 built-in iOS voices in 27 languages are also available for free” when you can’t use them without paying $80/year. I’m also getting increasingly fed up with apps that do everything possible to hide their true cost. After creating an account, you are presented with a full-screen pop-up to start a subscription. There is no way to leave this screen unless you close the app. You can’t even look at the app unless you agree to the subscription. The trial is one of the shortest I’ve seen on the App Store at just 3 days. They also advertise the subscription as “$6.66/month” despite only billing annually, again trying to obfuscate the true cost of the app. So if you’re expecting to have a $6.66 charge each month, I hope you’re prepared to actually spend $80 all at once. And then even if you do pay for the subscription, they charge an additional $5 for some of the voices.
I played the demo for a lot of the voices and was NOT impressed. That all sounded very robotic and unnatural.
There are features that I think would be really cool, like queuing up a list of documents/pages/books so that it automatically moves to the next in the list as you finish each document, but nothing I saw justified the high cost of the app. Especially when the best voices I came across were the newer “Enhanced” Siri voices that come with iOS.Show lesskk_ss_jj
Great app; some irritation points
So I use voice dream reader nearly daily for reading associated with my PhD program, but there are at least two significant irritations. 1. The highlighting system is atrocious. Sometimes you have to attempt to highlight more than once because it will not select all the way to the end of a sentence. Surely it would not take much to add some intelligence to this so that it knows to look for periods and spaces when selecting as separators? Kindle and Logos do this so much better. 2. No automatic sync with Dropbox or Google drive. You can add files from these services, but they will not sync back unless you export them one by one back into the cloud with your highlights. These two items alone continually waste hours of my time given the volume of reading I do. If it were not offset by being able to read at 700wpm, I’d probably look elsewhere. Nevertheless, given how there is little else out there to solve this problem, I appreciate this app immensely. I’d just love to see a couple of the above improvements happen sooner than later.
Update: a third problem is becoming prominent where it will not always read a page from top to bottom, but skips all over a page wherever fonts change, or even to a later page. Upon testing and inspection, it is not merely an ocr issue as other readers do not have this issue. In such cases, this app is becoming increasingly unusable.Show lessMstormer
Part of my life now
I can’t live without this app. My only gripe is crashes when loading huge ePub books. I like reading web novels and some of these are huge (350 hour monolithic LitRPG sagas with html tables and such). It becomes impossible to switch to rich text mode and I’m stuck with basic text only, which I don’t really mind but it would be great if that worked. I know it’s a daunting technical challenge to load such huge files, but maybe partition it per chapter and only load the relevant data needed to display the part I’m currently reading?
It’s a great app overall and totally worth a purchase. Also, I can’t thank the devs enough for the constant updates and QoL improvements they constantly add.Show lessAbdullah A. Hassan
Request for Rich Text Highlighting Feature
I have been a loyal user of Voice Dream for over seven years now, and while I appreciate its many features, there is one issue that I would like to address. Currently, the app only allows for highlighting when reading an epub file using their Plain Text format. While this may work for some books, it can be problematic for others, especially those with tables, bold text, formatted computer codes, and many other formatting styles. This can cause the Plain Text format to ruin the overall structure of the epub file.
I have noticed that other epub readers allow for highlighting in the original Rich Text format, which preserves the book's formatting style. I would love to see Voice Dream implement this feature as well, so that I can highlight my favorite books without worrying about losing their unique formatting.
Overall, I am a big fan of Voice Dream and appreciate all of its helpful features. I simply urge the developers to consider adding this one feature to make the app even more user-friendly and versatile.
Thank you.Show lessArianOnline
Life changing app
As someone who has ADHD and struggles to read, I have always been able to listen and comprehend very well. I've always preferred audiobooks to reading books. Unfortunately, this has been a major challenge for me regarding case studies and other academic materials, and newspaper articles.
Voice Dream Reader has been completely life-changing. The app is beautiful and well-designed, and I love that I can play through my entire reading list anytime I have my headphones in or drive. The app is very well-polished, and it is straightforward to add content by sharing.
The Mac App is also incredible. Voice Dream Reader is one of the most excellent apps I've ever discovered, and it is worth every penny; even the Mac subscription is worth the monthly cost. I highly recommend this application to anyone that wants to listen to content. Also, the available voices on iOS are incredible. Just go through all of them until you find your favorite one. There is no need to buy any voices, in my opinion, since the iOS voices are superior.Show lessrcbeall17
Downloaded the app to try it out
There is no mention that it is a subscription app in the app description. You can’t do anything in the app without signing up for the subscription.ChelsWin
Really useful for my ADHD
This app has been life-changing! I have wanted to study mycology and botany, but my ability to read (which was pretty poor to start with) has severely declined due to lots of stressors, ADHD, and PTSD. I could manage a few paragraphs a day of my plant biochemistry book on my own, but finished a whole chapter the day I started using Dream Reader. I love that I can set it to play every file, so that I have a queue of thngs playing while I do other stuff. I am glad to finally have proof that I can understabd complex subject matter, as long as it’s presented in an accessible way.
I appreciate how fast I can set the speaking rate, and the customizeability of the scrolling text. I use the option of only showing the word that is currently being spoken, but plan to try the other options to hopefully improve my reading ability.
Prior to finding this app I tried Speechify and Natural Speech, but those both much more expensive, and the price is for an annual prescription. The only thing missing for me with Voice Dream is the ability to export the text as MP3 files, but for the price I am happy to go without that.Show lessGWickPress
Very buggy on iPhone 14 Pro…
On the iPhone, 14 pro, the voices sound richer, the text feels easier on the eye… But all this is undone by bugginess. For example, when voicing a PDF, the phone’s system often voice takes over. In other words, the voice that I might choose, for example, Moira, or Daniel, becomes inactive while the terrible “accessibility“ voice reads out the text. When I tried to fix this, voice dream simply refused to read the PDF. Nothing I could do, no button I could press. I dreaded the prospect of contacting tech support. (As we all know, tech support is often time-consuming with the support people speaking poor and heavily accented English. Businesses get away with it because most people do not want to be accused of “racism“.)
_____ Whether the fault is with voice dream, or with Apple’s system, I don’t know. But yesterday I was in a situation in which I was totally locked out of my phone. It had something to do with the voice/accessibility feature. Trying to key in my passcode using the on screen keys just caused the phone to call out key numbers. I happened to be near my service provider’s store, so I rushed there in a panic, and my panic turned into even more panic, when even the staff were unable to fix the problem. Eventually they did, but told me not to go anywhere near “Accessibility“.Show lessHarryWillInsistOnTryB4Buy
Appreciation from a frequent user
I have been a user of Voice Dream for many years. So many that I cannot recall when I first downloaded this app. I use it daily to read newspaper articles as well as lengthy scholarly articles. I am also using it as a language learning tool, Japanese and German.
In all these tasks Voice Dream has never failed me.
I must also add that I am almost a computer illiterate person and an elderly one at that. If I can find my way around Voice Dream. If I can do that then anyone can do that too.
I have no hesitation in recommending this app to one and all.Show lessOldExpatOz
