31–40 of 49 posts
All apps that I know of use iOS internal TTS (sounds awful, not as good as Siri). Then is also Voice Dream Reader and even with the paid premium voices it is still not pleasant to listen to. Siri-grade TTS or Elevenlabs would be pleasant enough, though.
Were the onboard text recognition and speech synthesis APIs not good enough for this task?
iOS has pretty decent built-in OCR and TTS but give it a try on a book page if you're curious — unfortunately the OCR makes a lot of mistakes (as well as including footnotes etc.) and the TTS is still pretty robotic. I do hope and expect they'll improve soon, though, at which point the only advantage of this app will be that it can scan multiple pages at a time — probably not enough of an advantage to justify its exi…
I recently read an Isaac Asimov book where he was describing a device that takes a book and acts it out for you. Made me think we’re probably pretty close.
Love this but I have concerns with the price. You can usually find an audiobook corresponding to a paper book for relatively cheap. Services like Audible are a little more per month but you get more audio books. Given the 250 page per month limit at $9.99, how will this compete?
Yeah I (and my fiancée) are also Audible users — this app is mostly for cases where an audiobook or even e-book don't exist, like for older books you might get from a used bookstore or library. I'd prefer to set the price point lower, but if a user uses their 250-scan quota (which can be up to 500 pages, since you can scan 2 at a time) fully, I'll actually be losing about $10 on them that month, so I'm hoping not eve…
Is there something like this for epubs or pdfs with a truly high-quality TTS? All apps that I know of use iOS internal TTS (sounds awful, not as good as Siri). Then is also Voice Dream Reader and even with the paid premium voices it is still not pleasant to listen to. Siri-grade TTS or Elevenlabs would be pleasant enough, though.
Next step: turn the book into a 3D video. I recently read an Isaac Asimov book where he was describing a device that takes a book and acts it out for you. Made me think we’re probably pretty close.
I’m sorry, but LOL. Not even a full book.
That has to be one of the most terrible business models. I guess it’s in line with most app subscription models these days, only much worse. And if the excuse is “well it costs me too much on Azure and the phone native APIs are not good enough”, perhaps the answer is “don’t do it then”. No thanks.
Is there something like this for epubs or pdfs with a truly high-quality TTS? All apps that I know of use iOS internal TTS (sounds awful, not as good as Siri). Then is also Voice Dream Reader and even with the paid premium voices it is still not pleasant to listen to. Siri-grade TTS or Elevenlabs would be pleasant enough, though.
of course you can't generate audio for books purchased elsewhere because apple
Is there something like this for epubs or pdfs with a truly high-quality TTS? All apps that I know of use iOS internal TTS (sounds awful, not as good as Siri). Then is also Voice Dream Reader and even with the paid premium voices it is still not pleasant to listen to. Siri-grade TTS or Elevenlabs would be pleasant enough, though.