Freezes in MacOS-Cannot Install
The installation stops at the enhanced voices window. And then there is a menu box at the top that says “Type to Speak”. The only way that I could get rid of that is by installing a new MacOS version. I still have not been able to install this application on my Mac computer. I don’t know what’s gonna happen when I try to install Voice Nightmare! Help!
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Early adopter- punished
I paid for lifetime access prior to the integration of AI and now the voice I paid for does not work anymore. Waste of money
Beats Speechify for academics!
Got this to read my research material for my PhD. Was working full time and taking care of my family.
Voice dream’s bookmark and highlight feature allows you to tab sentences while on a run or a drive and lets you export only your tabbed text into a single txt file with the push of a button! Saves me weeks of time writing notes, trying to find them for papers/dissertation, etc.
Phenomenal app!
Voice dream’s bookmark and highlight feature allows you to tab sentences while on a run or a drive and lets you export only your tabbed text into a single txt file with the push of a button! Saves me weeks of time writing notes, trying to find them for papers/dissertation, etc.
Phenomenal app!
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Inexcusably Buggy, and Getting Worse
Once upon a time, this was the gold standard of accessible reading. This app is the reason I stopped using an ancient reading device from 2003 that ran on AA batteries, used a very robotic-sounding voice, and required software that only runs on Windows XP. For a bookworm, it was life-changing. So it doesn't bring me joy to do this, in fact I've put it off for a long time. But my experience using this app has become so consistently frustrating that I don't know how much longer I can do it. I speak only for myself and the people I know who also use the app.
First, audiobooks, because it's simple: When I listen to a zipped audio book, VoiceDream occasionally skips entire chapters. I realized this when I had just started a new book and the app skipped from the end of chapter 1 to the beginning of chapter 3. It's very easy to miss this if you're not paying attention to chapter numbers, so if you find yourself confused often when reading audiobooks, you might want to check that you've actually listened to every audio file within the book. I stopped using it for audiobooks, so I don't know if this was fixed, but I heard another complaint about it in early 2026 so it would have to be a very recent fix.
When I read ebooks, the behaviour is very buggy in a complex way, and mostly seems to affect Bluetooth audio devices like AirPods. I'll just describe individual things that I experience, but it all seems to be linked back to some critical problem with the way it works.
I use system voices, specifically Eloquence.
If I pause the book from my AirPods and then immediately unpause it, nothing happens. As in, the book stays paused indefinitely. I have to go over to my phone and play it from there.
When I take out one AirPod and put it back in, the book resumes, even if it was previously paused. This is useful as a way of unpausing the book, but very annoying when I'm trying to do something else on my phone, I shift the position of my AirPod, and I suddenly hear the book I haven't been reading for three hours.
When I open the app after pausing from AirPods, the interface shows that the book is playing, even though it's not.
If I pause the book and leave the app in background, it doesn't let go of the audio device. I know this because I occasionally use hearing aids, which use a different sound profile when audio is being streamed to them over Bluetooth. When I pause my book, the hearing aids don't exit this mode until I force-quit VoiceDream on my phone. I also use a multipoint Bluetooth device which connects to more than one device, playing audio from only one at a time. Normally, when I pause Spotify or YouTube or a certain alternative reader app which is very EASY to use, I'm then able to interact with my Apple Watch and hear the audio through the headset. However, since VoiceDream never lets go of the audio device, I have to force-quit the app before I can use my watch. Multipoint is terrible and I don't blame VoiceDream for the way my headset works, but that behaviour does prove to me that VoiceDream is leaving the audio device open.
And lastly, sometimes VoiceDream seems to lose its handle on the audio playback and doesn't correctly account for it. So whether I use AirPods, the lock screen, or the play button in the app itself, my book simply will not play. This happens at least twice a week, and it just happened to me after I swapped from one pair of AirPods to the other, which is what prompted me to write this review. Once again, I had to force-quit VoiceDream before I could read my book again.
All of this results in a hilariously bad reading experience on Bluetooth, and the only reason I haven't ditched this app is because I still use wired headphones often. But when I don't, I have to pause and unpause from my phone, and if I forget to do that, I have to remove one of my AirPods for a couple of seconds and put it back in before my book will resume. And even then, it very often doesn't, leaving me to stop whatever I was doing, unlock my phone, and restart the app for the eleventeenth time that day.
I can confirm that many of these issues are more than six months old, but I binge-read several audiobook series in another app over the course of more than a year before switching back to VoiceDream in mid-2025, so I suspect many of the bugs described here have existed for much longer. I really enjoy this app, I used to have good email threads with its original developer, and I really hoped the acquisition would not result in longterm bugs like this, but these are reproducible, frequent, disruptive bugs. I sincerely hope this app gets better, because if the experience for others is anything like my own, it is in critical condition and on life support.
Update (June 2026):
I'm getting a daily pop-up asking why I unsubscribed from this app. It is not accessible for VoiceOver users at all, to the point that I can't dismiss the pop-up without closing and reopening the app. The only accessible part is re-subscribing to the app. It's very clear that the developers implemented this screen without actually testing it with a screen reader, and that is completely inexcusable when blind people make up a large chunk of their audience.
First, audiobooks, because it's simple: When I listen to a zipped audio book, VoiceDream occasionally skips entire chapters. I realized this when I had just started a new book and the app skipped from the end of chapter 1 to the beginning of chapter 3. It's very easy to miss this if you're not paying attention to chapter numbers, so if you find yourself confused often when reading audiobooks, you might want to check that you've actually listened to every audio file within the book. I stopped using it for audiobooks, so I don't know if this was fixed, but I heard another complaint about it in early 2026 so it would have to be a very recent fix.
When I read ebooks, the behaviour is very buggy in a complex way, and mostly seems to affect Bluetooth audio devices like AirPods. I'll just describe individual things that I experience, but it all seems to be linked back to some critical problem with the way it works.
I use system voices, specifically Eloquence.
If I pause the book from my AirPods and then immediately unpause it, nothing happens. As in, the book stays paused indefinitely. I have to go over to my phone and play it from there.
When I take out one AirPod and put it back in, the book resumes, even if it was previously paused. This is useful as a way of unpausing the book, but very annoying when I'm trying to do something else on my phone, I shift the position of my AirPod, and I suddenly hear the book I haven't been reading for three hours.
When I open the app after pausing from AirPods, the interface shows that the book is playing, even though it's not.
If I pause the book and leave the app in background, it doesn't let go of the audio device. I know this because I occasionally use hearing aids, which use a different sound profile when audio is being streamed to them over Bluetooth. When I pause my book, the hearing aids don't exit this mode until I force-quit VoiceDream on my phone. I also use a multipoint Bluetooth device which connects to more than one device, playing audio from only one at a time. Normally, when I pause Spotify or YouTube or a certain alternative reader app which is very EASY to use, I'm then able to interact with my Apple Watch and hear the audio through the headset. However, since VoiceDream never lets go of the audio device, I have to force-quit the app before I can use my watch. Multipoint is terrible and I don't blame VoiceDream for the way my headset works, but that behaviour does prove to me that VoiceDream is leaving the audio device open.
And lastly, sometimes VoiceDream seems to lose its handle on the audio playback and doesn't correctly account for it. So whether I use AirPods, the lock screen, or the play button in the app itself, my book simply will not play. This happens at least twice a week, and it just happened to me after I swapped from one pair of AirPods to the other, which is what prompted me to write this review. Once again, I had to force-quit VoiceDream before I could read my book again.
All of this results in a hilariously bad reading experience on Bluetooth, and the only reason I haven't ditched this app is because I still use wired headphones often. But when I don't, I have to pause and unpause from my phone, and if I forget to do that, I have to remove one of my AirPods for a couple of seconds and put it back in before my book will resume. And even then, it very often doesn't, leaving me to stop whatever I was doing, unlock my phone, and restart the app for the eleventeenth time that day.
I can confirm that many of these issues are more than six months old, but I binge-read several audiobook series in another app over the course of more than a year before switching back to VoiceDream in mid-2025, so I suspect many of the bugs described here have existed for much longer. I really enjoy this app, I used to have good email threads with its original developer, and I really hoped the acquisition would not result in longterm bugs like this, but these are reproducible, frequent, disruptive bugs. I sincerely hope this app gets better, because if the experience for others is anything like my own, it is in critical condition and on life support.
Update (June 2026):
I'm getting a daily pop-up asking why I unsubscribed from this app. It is not accessible for VoiceOver users at all, to the point that I can't dismiss the pop-up without closing and reopening the app. The only accessible part is re-subscribing to the app. It's very clear that the developers implemented this screen without actually testing it with a screen reader, and that is completely inexcusable when blind people make up a large chunk of their audience.
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Sounds terrible
This sounds awful. DON’T BUY! I purchased it for a month and even the paid versions are terrible. NaturalReader was much better and I’ll still with that. If I could , I’d give it a zero.
