# Speech Central – Voice Reader — user reviews > 465 indexed App Store user reviews of Speech Central by Labsii, rated 4.60/5 from 1,546 ratings. - Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/speech-central-voice-reader/id1127349155/reviews - App overview in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/speech-central-voice-reader/id1127349155.md - Rating breakdown: 5★ 1,203 · 4★ 195 · 3★ 66 · 2★ 26 · 1★ 56 ## What do users think of Speech Central? Overall sentiment: positive **Pros** - 🚀 Life-saving app - 👍 Nice app - 👍 Great app - 👍 Affordable and full-featured - 👍 Excellent app for accessibility - 👍 Highly recommended - 👍 Fantastic app - 👍 Amazing app **Cons** - 🐛 Not great - 🐛 Trash - 🐛 Robotic voices - 🐛 Terrible voices - 🐛 Buggy - 🐛 Crashes frequently - 🐛 Pauses reading unexpectedly - 🐛 Unreliable performance **Commonly reported bugs** - Crashes when changing advanced settings - Inconsistent behavior when importing documents - Fails to recognize some file formats - Playback issues with high-speed mode - Repeating chapters unexpectedly - Scrolling issues with long documents **Most requested features** - Add more natural-sounding voices - Improve chapter/section navigation - Allow custom pronunciation of words - Add support for more languages - Integrate with Bookshare library - Improve PDF formatting and layout - Add more customization options - Improve sync between devices ## Newest reviews (12 of 465) ### 4/5 — Chunking, custom api request editing *2026-08-30, version 17.8.1* Would be nice to be able to specify a minimum number of characters to send in a chunk to my local ai server to help the tts. Some amount of customization of the request to the ai server would be nice too. Maybe an offline processor, to generate the full audio book without any real time processing? Or chapter by chapter? ### 4/5 — No title just make it stop *2026-08-16, version 17.7.2* Yup good app. Want the rate and review pop ups to stop ### 3/5 — Good but some words are badly pronounced *2026-07-27, version 17.6.0* This is actually an app for turning PDF and other files into audio files. However, there are some glaring mistakes with pronunciation of very common words like “reached” or “sunshine” that you think would not be difficult to pronounce even for an AI bot but they apparently are. ### 3/5 — Rating glitch *2026-06-23, version 17.4.6* This app has asked me to rate it SEVEN TIMES!!! It use to have a four star rating, but this constant need for validation glitch has cost the app a star ### 4/5 — Great, but has a few bugs *2026-05-28, version 17.4.0* I’ve been using this app for a few years and overall it does 90% of what I want. The only gripe I have with it is that it doesn’t play very nicely with AirPods. It seems to interpret the in ear detection as a toggle so that sometimes when I take out one of my AirPods from one of my ears, it will just start playing. Occasionally it also starts playing on speaker when I put my AirPods away. ### 5/5 — Ideal solution with ethical business model *2026-05-12, version 17.4.0* One-time cost is refreshing in a world of subscriptions and it works great! Just make sure to download “Premium” voice in Accessibility settings. Sync with desktop version is seamless & super appreciate the privacy profile (nothing shared with Developer - everything local to device by default). ### 5/5 — Surprisingly good *2026-05-03, version 17.4.0* I've tried other, more expensive text to speech apps and cancelled them all. This is good enough, I can use it easily and listen happily. And it's a good price too. ### 5/5 — Amazing *2026-04-29, version 17.3.6* I use this app always help me a lot ### 2/5 — A good concept but…. *2026-04-27, version 17.3.6* I really wanted this app to deliver, because the idea behind it is genuinely strong. Having a simple way to load and listen to saved content, especially for things like road trips, is exactly what a lot of people are looking for. Unfortunately, it hasn’t quite lived up to that promise in practice. CarPlay integration is the biggest issue. It’s unreliable, often failing to load saved files, and at times not playing anything at all. When you’re on the road and relying on it, that kind of inconsistency becomes frustrating very quickly. The text-to-speech quality is another drawback. The voice feels quite robotic and lacks the natural flow you would expect. Compared to newer tools, the difference is noticeable, and it makes longer listening sessions harder to enjoy. I recently used the app on a road trip after preparing over 30 files in advance, which should have been the perfect use case. Instead, it became more of a distraction than a help, with repeated issues interrupting what should have been a seamless experience. There’s a solid concept here, but the execution needs refinement, particularly around stability and voice quality, to really make it dependable. ### 4/5 — Very good *2026-04-25, version 17.3.6* Very good TTS reader with decent voice pitch setting. I love that you can export audio files. My only wish so far is that there was an option for correcting pronunciations. ### 3/5 — There are still 2 bug *2026-03-25, version 17.3.2* The "Select All" Button in the last 2 versions does not work. Before many versions, the "previous title, next title" buttons of Dynamic Island did not work in gray. === 最近2个版本“全选”按钮不起作用。 很多版本之前，灵动岛“上一标题，下一标题”按钮灰色不起作用。 ### 5/5 — A Game Changer for Reading Comprehension!! *2026-03-14, version 17.3.0* This is an excellent app for those that have trouble maintaining focus while reading, learning a foreign language, overcoming impairments, or if you just want to turn any text into human sounding audio. For human-like narration, I recommend configuring an API key in the app as per the developer’s documentation. If you omit this step, the app will default to iOS Accessibility voices that sound robotic. Hopefully, more users will take the time to read the directions instead of writing negative comments. It only takes 5 minutes folks! I’m grateful to the developer for creating this app and look forward to future updates! ## Most critical reviews (10 lowest-rated) ### 1/5 — Terrible reader *2026-08-16, version 17.7.2* On a basic level, it can’t even download PDFs in a way that the text can be read. Sentences in words are all stacked together without space in between them. As a result, the reader just spells out sentences instead of reading word by word. It’s even worse is that it leads out components of sentences cuts off paragraphs. The reader is terrible. The voice is not smooth and cannot distinguish acronyms from words. I wish I never paid money for this garbage. ### 1/5 — Nagging for review = one star. *2026-08-04, version 17.6.1* See title. ### 1/5 — Scrambles document text and becomes unintelligible *2026-07-11, version 17.4.7* There has always been a minor issue with the document import where it would drop the odd word but it’s gotten significantly worse lately where it moves whole sentences around and the audio becomes a bit of a garbled mess - please fix!! ### 1/5 — Cannot read scanned PDFs *2026-06-12, version 17.4.5* This app cannot read scanned PDFs. I already bought it but it cannot read scaned PDF ### 1/5 — Please refund me *2026-06-04, version 17.4.0* I bought pro because the free tier voices were really bad, but it had the exact same voices. ### 1/5 — Ok but needs I pad support for reaction *2026-05-15, version 17.4.0* Slow and unresponsive in settings on iPad, totally still freezing after one full day and keeps shutting down there’s been no resolution and it’s totally unusable the way it works on that side. ### 1/5 — Choppy in CarPlay *2026-05-12, version 17.4.0* I moved to speechify. As to the devs comments, I don’t think a brand new iPhone pro on a 2026 Lexus stock CarPlay is low cost device, idk why the developer is mad, he made a bad app so I reviewed it fairly. No other app has these issues. Also i discovered on reddit from googling that the developer often attacks people not just me. ### 1/5 — Choppy in CarPlay *2026-05-05, version 17.4.0* Does anyone know a good app to read word docs in CarPlay? ### 1/5 — Zero help with external services. *2026-01-30, version 17.1.0* I’ve used Microsoft Azure TTS a lot, both in my own code (eg, through the Python API, and other apps). I like it. But I can’t get it to work with this app, primarily because there’s zero feedback from this app on what’s going wrong. It just flashes and reverts to the Apple TTS. No help at all about what might be going wrong. So this app useless to me, but also wasted a bunch of my time (and I stupidly paid the $10 up front, just assuming it would allow Azure to work like everywhere else). I like the idea of the app, to allow me to choose and pay for the service I want, but there needs to be some effort in helping this to work and especially giving feedback on errors. Having use the Microsoft service myself, I know they give a lot of useful info when something doesn’t work, but the developer is choosing not the share that. ### 1/5 — Trash *2025-11-21, version 17.0.3* The voices on this app sound like they were the offsprings of Stephen Hawking and Sloth (Goonies). ## Most praised reviews (10 highest-rated) ### 5/5 — best app on text to speech *2026-08-26, version 17.8.0* customizable And now with the new sounds that you can download the other app, it is really really fantastic. The sound are genuine and they're good. They're very good actually. - ### 5/5 — Accessible, intuitive, and easy to use *2026-07-17, version 17.5.0* Came across this app and now absolutely love it! I find it to be the easiest way to save webpages and news articles and other things I want to go back to and look at and use as references for things like books movies other lists of information that I want to keep for the future ### 5/5 — Men *2026-07-16, version 17.5.0* Dmdndn ### 5/5 — Great for dyslexia *2026-06-14, version 17.4.6* I have severe dyslexia and I struggle ate reading this app makes it very easy to go through my favourite fanfics or books ### 5/5 — This is what I am looking for it *2026-06-14, version 17.4.6* I found it really enjoyable to listen to a book while driving and walking with my Bluetooth earphones. ### 5/5 — Works great *2026-06-12, version 17.4.5* Download fanfic onto the app so I can listen on the go ### 5/5 — Very good app *2026-06-10, version 17.4.5* But I’m mostly doing this in hopes that the app will stop asking me to review it ### 5/5 — Okay it’s the best *2026-06-04, version 17.4.0* Only because the “Are you enjoying this app” pop up keeps assaulting me every time I open this app and desperately hope it stops after I leave a Written review along with my forth 5-star review, YES I might use this app a little too much for reading my fics. Biggest perk is it’s free even if the AI voices are a bit rough. I did find a way to upload a slightly better one but still not the greatest. I’ve gotten used to it. I like that it saves my stuff in one place. Again it’s FREE, so beggars can’t be choosers. Room for improvement, but don’t think that’s the goal for the creators of this app because I’ve had it while and haven’t seen many changes. If you want delivery for the cheap price of FREE, this is your reader app. ### 5/5 — Excellent *2026-06-02, version 17.4.0* Very good app! ### 5/5 — This is exactly what I need. *2026-05-25, version 17.4.0* Fantastic, simple and efficient --- *Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-09-07.*