Voice DreamA new incarnation of the Voice Dream text-to-speech program—for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch—hit the Apple app store recently.

My original Voice Dream review is here. Price is $9.99, still worth every penny.

Winston Chen, the app’s developer, has made good on his promise to offer a paging option, so that you don’t have to scroll, Web-browser fashion, if you’re reading an e-book by sight. The downside of the beta version was that if you made annotations, Voice Dream lapsed back into its scrolling made. As far as I can tell—and maybe I’m wrong—that bug is gone from the current version, 2.8.2.

Now I’m hoping for other refinements, such as synchronization of e-book collections on different devices, of annotations, and of “last page read.” This could happen by way of the Dropbox cloud or otherwise. My favorite voice from Voice Dream’s built-in store right now is “Peter,” a British-accented baritone available for just $1.99, and meanwhile I’ve suggested to Winston that he do his best to be able to offer another UK gem, “Amy.”

I’d also like to see arrangements for Voice Dream to work with DRMed books, especially library ones distributed by OverDrive and other vendors. And if Winston can release versions for Android and other platforms beyond iOS, so much the better.

Note: The screenshot above is from an older version of Voice Dream.

This post originally appeared on LibraryCity.org, the Creative Commons-licensed blog of TeleRead founder David Rothman.

NO COMMENTS

  1. The Amy voice and Moon+ Reader–I own the Pro edition–are a terrific pair for my Nexus 10 and other Android devices. But Moon isn’t for iOS machines like my iPad, and the voice-related controls lack the ease and flexibility of Voice Dream Reader.

    On my iPad, VDR can even offer TTS of Web pages seen and downloaded from within the program, just as I can hear Amy versions and other voices by way of a Web browser and Pocket, etc., on my Nexus.

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