The TTS service is horrible
The great thing about yuzu is having the book on hand for a class. It’s great to aggregate all my reading material in one app. Now that the pros are out of the way let’s talk about the cons. The text to speech engine is an embarrassment. It is the reason I’m writing this review. It sounds like Steven hawking translator that he made in 1980. Trying to listen to it is like listening to glass on a chalkboard. The work around is opening it up on a browser to highlight and use Microsoft web TTS engine. Idk why yuzu hasn’t invested a dollar into making or licensing a better speech software. I even know students who copy and paste the book into a word document to have words TTS software to read it to them. Reading books on a screen is already difficult enough on the eyes. If you’re going to have a TTS function don’t make it sound like garbage. I don’t use this app anymore and have instead used yuzu through the browser for better functionality which is sad. I’m giving it 2 stars, bc it holds my library not bc I actually use the app
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Reader preference Custom settings
The app itself seems to work well, IF you leave the reader preferences on publisher formatting. The second you want to customize how the reading experience will be, is exactly when the app breaks down. Page scrolling locks up. App crashes, and content gets cut off. Clearly the development team isn’t unit testing on multiple platforms. If they were, they would see the UX degradation and note that an ok app turns into one of the worst on the app market.
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Great app when you have to go somewhere and you don’t want to miss out
Great app, the AI voices are pretty cool but sometimes it reminds me of the 90s Mac voices that were a hidden secret you never told anyone about until you made it talk. It’s a great app for studying the textbooks for the go. I recommend it for anyone who wants to listen to the book and follow along with a physical copy or listen for sleep like Homer and his weight loss tapes that were actually linguistics because they ran out of the weight loss tapes. If you have Barnes and noble connected to your college bookstore it’s very useful for the book
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Read-Out Loud option is a joke and spooky
The read-out loud feature is a joke. Other than that, it works like any other ebook. It’s expensive, and I’d rather just use Cengage directly.
College Use
Terrible if you want to highlight anything, or make notes because it is not user friendly on a regular phone. I only use it to read my textbooks aloud but it tweaks the screen formatting out which makes it difficult to use any other feature while it reads aloud. Please fix the missing highlight feature, and lower the audio buttons because it is in the way of the text so we can actually read the bottom of the page.
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