Voice Dream Reader

I always look for ways to improve my reading speed for books, and recently I came across the iOS app called Voice Dream Reader. It was a little expensive for an app, being $12, but it had glowing reviews and it sounded like what I was looking for, so I purchased it to give it a go.

To say that I was impressed is an understatement. Simply put, Voice Dream Reader is a fantastic program for reading on your iPhone or iPad which reads pretty much everything except Mobi (Amazon Kindle) files. But that isn’t the most important part! It’s real shining area is that it’s an amazing Text to Speech reader that turns any book into an audiobook being read by any of 100 different voices in 20 languages, with more high-quality synthetic voices being added all the time.

So now, I can read something, and then just switch to having it read to me as I go out to walk the dogs or run errands, and all without having to buy an expensive audiobook or worry about losing my place. It also syncs nicely with Dropbox or Google Drive for getting books onto the App with ease.

Awesome!

I’ve already used it to power through one book in record time, and plan to keep using it to help get through my Summer reading.

That said, I should note two things:

1) While the default voice “Heather” is comes with is really good, there are better voices in their catalog, but you have to pay between $2-$5 for each extra voice. The one that most impressed me was “Will”, which almost sounded like a real person.

2) These are still synthetic voices, and there is no comparison between them and the performance from a real audiobook reader. While synthetic voice technology has clearly made huge gains, a real reader brings the book more to life with things like inflection and tone changes that indicate different characters are speaking. Voice Dream doesn’t do that, but it still makes for a pretty good listening experience once you get used to it.

 

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