Native iOS “live speech” feature is more functional
I used this app extensively and all “premium” functionality became paywalled. What little functionality was there is already less functional than the stock iOS live speech functionality.
Absolute gem
Had a very stressful nonstop screaming week and strained my neck muscles so was given instructions to not talk for atleast 3 days and this app makes it feel like I never stopped love it!
Gets worse
I can’t talk right now because of medical reasons, so it causes me pain to do so. This app was great at first when I could save phrases that I commonly needed help with from the people around me. But then it wanted me to pay for it and pops up everytime I open the app witch’s makes me slower to reply. I would recommend something better that doesn’t shove adds in your face if you are using it for a reason that I am.
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Life saving
I love this app so much. It’s the best most accessible and free AAC app I have found and I use it often. I like that it’s customizable and you can save your own phrases. If I had to add something to it I would add folders to store separate saved phrases. But this app is awesome !!!
Pretty good for someone with little communication skills.
I’m young but I have barely any communication skills. This app is good for people who can’t communicate what they want or need in the moment. I’m taking a star off because I feel like it could be better, but it’s pretty decent.
Investigation.
Hello. My name is Savannah I'm legally blind and became new to the app via a friend named Madaline.
I'm reaching out to the developers with some concerns regarding the Spoken app made to help people with blindness and visually impaired uses.
I feel that the app was made very poorly and here are some of the concerns that I have.
1. The buttons are not labeled correctly, and there are a lot of graphics in the way to the point of a person being stuck in one place example would be the text field.
2. Please pick up an iphone or any other IOS device and learn how VoiceOver is used via blind people living with blindness.
3. When a person selects any of the female voices, examples would be Rose or any other voices, it goes back to Samantha Default.
Can you guys look into this or is this typical to do this type of thing?
4. The last concern I have here is that when a person with blindness uses a braille display via pered to the iphone or ipad, if a person presses the enterkey it repeats the statements like it should, but can the done button be placed to the right instead of being labeled at the far right hand corner?
I'm reaching out to the developers with some concerns regarding the Spoken app made to help people with blindness and visually impaired uses.
I feel that the app was made very poorly and here are some of the concerns that I have.
1. The buttons are not labeled correctly, and there are a lot of graphics in the way to the point of a person being stuck in one place example would be the text field.
2. Please pick up an iphone or any other IOS device and learn how VoiceOver is used via blind people living with blindness.
3. When a person selects any of the female voices, examples would be Rose or any other voices, it goes back to Samantha Default.
Can you guys look into this or is this typical to do this type of thing?
4. The last concern I have here is that when a person with blindness uses a braille display via pered to the iphone or ipad, if a person presses the enterkey it repeats the statements like it should, but can the done button be placed to the right instead of being labeled at the far right hand corner?
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Very badly made for blind and visually impaired people
Hello, my name is Madeline, I would like to let you guys know this app is not accessible to voiceover users. Voiceover does not recognize that there is a Settings button in there and there’s so many other things that Blind users cannot do with this app that sided users can.
Not Intuitive
I will start by saying that I find the idea of paying an ongoing subscription fee in order to access basic communication to repugnant. A one-time cost that pays the developers fairly for their work is perfectly reasonable. The expectation that one can have their voice taken away at any time if they can no longer afford it is not.
As for the app itself, about the only positive thing I have to say about it is that the voices are decent. They are smooth and not overly robotic. That said, the speech kept glitching, and the first part of my sentences would get cut off randomly, so only the last half of the sentence could be heard.
The lack of organisation for the word prediction renders it functionally useless. I can write, “I want,” and then spend 10 minutes scrolling in search of the thing I want, or I can take two seconds to type the word in myself. If a person has cognitive disabilities such as aphasia, which cause them to forget or otherwise be unable to type what they want to say, to the point that they need to search for the pre-written word, there are AAC apps that provide this feature as a core part of how they function. This app is not going to meet the needs of such people.
Additionally, even when I do press a word in the search function, it immediately pulls up the keyboard every time. This blocks my view of all but the top row of searched words, and I almost deleted the app after five seconds due to how annoying it was to have to close the keyboard after every single word that I pressed.
The saved phrases function saves some time, but if you have more than five or six phrases saved, it is again going to take you longer to find the phrase in your list than it will to just type out the whole sentence. There is no way of making the phrases visually distinct from one another, such as via the use of pictures or colours. Everything is the same black and white, in the same font, requiring you to read out each phrase separately to find the one you want.
A big reason that other AAC apps have variable colour and picture customisation is not only for pre-literate children, it is to make the task of finding the word or phrase you want as quick and efficient as possible.
As it stands, this app is an expensive text to speech app with a few fancy but functionally useless bells tacked on. If you want a useful, practical, affordable text-based speech app, I would recommend Speech Assistant instead.
As for the app itself, about the only positive thing I have to say about it is that the voices are decent. They are smooth and not overly robotic. That said, the speech kept glitching, and the first part of my sentences would get cut off randomly, so only the last half of the sentence could be heard.
The lack of organisation for the word prediction renders it functionally useless. I can write, “I want,” and then spend 10 minutes scrolling in search of the thing I want, or I can take two seconds to type the word in myself. If a person has cognitive disabilities such as aphasia, which cause them to forget or otherwise be unable to type what they want to say, to the point that they need to search for the pre-written word, there are AAC apps that provide this feature as a core part of how they function. This app is not going to meet the needs of such people.
Additionally, even when I do press a word in the search function, it immediately pulls up the keyboard every time. This blocks my view of all but the top row of searched words, and I almost deleted the app after five seconds due to how annoying it was to have to close the keyboard after every single word that I pressed.
The saved phrases function saves some time, but if you have more than five or six phrases saved, it is again going to take you longer to find the phrase in your list than it will to just type out the whole sentence. There is no way of making the phrases visually distinct from one another, such as via the use of pictures or colours. Everything is the same black and white, in the same font, requiring you to read out each phrase separately to find the one you want.
A big reason that other AAC apps have variable colour and picture customisation is not only for pre-literate children, it is to make the task of finding the word or phrase you want as quick and efficient as possible.
As it stands, this app is an expensive text to speech app with a few fancy but functionally useless bells tacked on. If you want a useful, practical, affordable text-based speech app, I would recommend Speech Assistant instead.
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Amazing for speech aphasia or apraxia
My wife had a brain tumor removed and lost speech temporarily while the brain recovered. She had full comprehension and knew the words to say she just couldn't speak them. She could type on her phone perfectly fine, and this app coupled with a good quality Bluetooth speaker was a godsend. - it gave her a voice. The "poppy" voice is a very nice natural female voice.
I have one suggestion. Autocorrect - either as a default or at least as an option to just use the phone's built in autocorrect. The predictive text is awesome, but in the days after the surgery as my wife became more comfortable looking at her phone and typing, we found she could type what she wanted to say faster than selecting words from predictive text (which was awesome at first or for those with difficulty typing). In our situation we also found it much more natural to turn off the setting to speak every word as it's being typed, and instead write out the sentence, then tell the app to speak. However, the lack of auto correct on individually typed words really slowed her down. We all have gotten spoiled by autocorrect so it seems unnatural and difficult to type without it.
I have one suggestion. Autocorrect - either as a default or at least as an option to just use the phone's built in autocorrect. The predictive text is awesome, but in the days after the surgery as my wife became more comfortable looking at her phone and typing, we found she could type what she wanted to say faster than selecting words from predictive text (which was awesome at first or for those with difficulty typing). In our situation we also found it much more natural to turn off the setting to speak every word as it's being typed, and instead write out the sentence, then tell the app to speak. However, the lack of auto correct on individually typed words really slowed her down. We all have gotten spoiled by autocorrect so it seems unnatural and difficult to type without it.
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its so cool!
hello! i am a semi-verbal autistic teen. i use this when i go non verbal or dont choose to speak! its very helpful in situations where i cant speak. i love that i can create my own sentences and be able to customize the voice! its also very convenient, i could use it anywhere. im unfortunately undiagnosed but got it confirmed by a physician, so my parents sort of understand my situation when i use this. thank you so much for creating this wonderful app! 🫶🏻
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Shameful, legitimately.
The fact that these developers rug-pulled certain people by originally having the voice change options be free - and as of a recent update, it seems, put it behind a paywall is… Shameful to say the least.
The app already had its issues and its ridiculous choices as to what to paywall. But the concept of paywalling something that may help an AAC user feel some level of control over something as identifying as their voice… It’s repulsive. It’s a disgusting choice.
Plus, doing such and having the gal to call their app “accessible” - have sales for AAC awareness despite everything showing they don’t care about AAC users who don’t pay them - and doubling this paywall by hiding any sort of one time payment on their website, leaving only a subscription open on the app. It just very much reads like they! Don’t! Care!
@Devs; I genuinely expect you to respond with the same canned “Go to our website for a one time payment uwu” like you do to everyone else. Go ahead. It shows how little you care.
The app already had its issues and its ridiculous choices as to what to paywall. But the concept of paywalling something that may help an AAC user feel some level of control over something as identifying as their voice… It’s repulsive. It’s a disgusting choice.
Plus, doing such and having the gal to call their app “accessible” - have sales for AAC awareness despite everything showing they don’t care about AAC users who don’t pay them - and doubling this paywall by hiding any sort of one time payment on their website, leaving only a subscription open on the app. It just very much reads like they! Don’t! Care!
@Devs; I genuinely expect you to respond with the same canned “Go to our website for a one time payment uwu” like you do to everyone else. Go ahead. It shows how little you care.
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Greedy Developers smh
Love the voice options but the price is ridiculous. I would recommend this to all of my autistic friends if it wasnt 12 dollars a month or 99 a year! No option for one time purchase at a reasonable price??? Putting this kind of paywall on disabled people is shameful.
Overpriced for a basic and disappointing product
The fact that this app has the gall to call itself “accessible” and then lock basic features behind exorbitant prices to extort the disabled insults me. The lifetime premium is far more expensive for what it does (unlocks a few basic features), and they hide it on their website- in the app you can only pay for the subscriptions, because they want to prey on people who forget to unsubscribe.
I did not ask to be disabled. I would simply speak if I could. That’s not an excuse to extort me.
It even goes so far as to disable the predictive text feature which came built into my phone’s keyboard just so they could paywall a “learning predictive keyboard” as a “premium” feature. This also disables autocorrect, which is incredibly frustrating.
On top of that, the predictive text is useless. It loads so slowly that typing is much faster. It can’t even be used offline, unlike, oh, I don’t know, the predictive text feature built into my phone’s keyboard.
I thought once my free trial ran out that I would be restricted to one or two basic voice options, presumably the first two on the list (Magnolia and Oak), with no control over pitch or speed.
Nope. The voice they gave me wasn’t even an option. It’s the most outdated, horrible sounding tts voice I’ve ever heard. Barely legible and grating on the ears. It’s apparently called DECTalk and was made all the way back in 1983. Impressive technology for the time, sure, but horrendous today.
Just awful. I’d get better results from using google translate’s built in voice.
I did not ask to be disabled. I would simply speak if I could. That’s not an excuse to extort me.
It even goes so far as to disable the predictive text feature which came built into my phone’s keyboard just so they could paywall a “learning predictive keyboard” as a “premium” feature. This also disables autocorrect, which is incredibly frustrating.
On top of that, the predictive text is useless. It loads so slowly that typing is much faster. It can’t even be used offline, unlike, oh, I don’t know, the predictive text feature built into my phone’s keyboard.
I thought once my free trial ran out that I would be restricted to one or two basic voice options, presumably the first two on the list (Magnolia and Oak), with no control over pitch or speed.
Nope. The voice they gave me wasn’t even an option. It’s the most outdated, horrible sounding tts voice I’ve ever heard. Barely legible and grating on the ears. It’s apparently called DECTalk and was made all the way back in 1983. Impressive technology for the time, sure, but horrendous today.
Just awful. I’d get better results from using google translate’s built in voice.
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Exploitation at it’s finest.
Essential tools for accommodating neurodivergent people or other disabilities should not be locked behind a paywall and to do so is disgusting really.
I would not mind if it were £2 or so a month but £7 a month or £50 a year to use? Total joke.
I would not mind if it were £2 or so a month but £7 a month or £50 a year to use? Total joke.
Paid Premium
It’s a great tool but adding a premium subscription does lessen the app’s accessibility.
Requires Literacy
This app would be ok for someone who is educated and can read/understand English, but it is not helpful for people who don’t have written English language skills. You need to be able to read in English to successfully use this app. Most people who can read, can also speak for themselves. I would only recommend this app for a person of average to above average intelligence who is fluent in reading the English language. It is very text heavy and the images are not big enough or drawn in a way that aids understanding.
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Would have changed my life!
Too bad it's behind a massive paywall!
This is one of the best apps I have ever used to TTS. It helps a lot when I'm nonverbal. It has great voices, speedy ways to use the app, just one problem. I have to pay $13 a month??? Are you kidding me? Maybe one time, sure, but every month? Imagine paying a subscription fee for a cane or a wheelchair. These developers are greedy. Stop putting disability aids behind a huge paywall. This is such a disappointment and the devs should be ashamed.
This is one of the best apps I have ever used to TTS. It helps a lot when I'm nonverbal. It has great voices, speedy ways to use the app, just one problem. I have to pay $13 a month??? Are you kidding me? Maybe one time, sure, but every month? Imagine paying a subscription fee for a cane or a wheelchair. These developers are greedy. Stop putting disability aids behind a huge paywall. This is such a disappointment and the devs should be ashamed.
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Subscription??
The app functions great, but why should anyone have to pay a subscription to use an accessibility feature? There are nonverbal people for multitudes of reasons, and to profit off that is asinine. $12 a month for full access to an app that benefits nonverbal people everywhere is atrocious behavior. Just make the features free.
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Makes life so much easier
This app is amazing. I recently got a tracheostomy and was unable to speak. This app completely solved my problem. There are a variety of very nice voices to use. It often has a useful list of words to pick from for auto complete
Feature Suggestions:
The alert isn’t loud enough and can’t get people’s attention. At least that’s been my experience.
It would be so nice if you could reorder your list of sayings!! Please add this!!
Another extremely helpful one is to add groups or collections to your sayings. I’ve got so many in my list now that it can take a while to scroll through and find what I want. And since I can’t adjust the ordering, that makes it slower too, because I could order the list alphabetically or some way to find things faster. Please add this!!!
I absolutely love this app which is why I paid for it! I looked at a lot of speech apps and this one was better in every way.
Feature Suggestions:
The alert isn’t loud enough and can’t get people’s attention. At least that’s been my experience.
It would be so nice if you could reorder your list of sayings!! Please add this!!
Another extremely helpful one is to add groups or collections to your sayings. I’ve got so many in my list now that it can take a while to scroll through and find what I want. And since I can’t adjust the ordering, that makes it slower too, because I could order the list alphabetically or some way to find things faster. Please add this!!!
I absolutely love this app which is why I paid for it! I looked at a lot of speech apps and this one was better in every way.
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How did y’all miss this
I like how customisable the voices are but every time I type a sentence it never pronounces the first word at first
