Contact Voice Dream Support

by Mstormer

So I use voice dream reader nearly daily for reading associated with my PhD program, but there are at least two significant irritations. 1. The highlighting system is atrocious. Sometimes you have to attempt to highlight more than once because it will not select all the way to the end of a sentence. Surely it would not take much to add some intelligence to this so that it knows to look for periods and spaces when selecting as separators? Kindle and Logos do this so much better. 2. No automatic sync with Dropbox or Google drive. You can add files from these services, but they will not sync back unless you export them one by one back into the cloud with your highlights. These two items alone continually waste hours of my time given the volume of reading I do. If it were not offset by being able to read at 700wpm, I’d probably look elsewhere. Nevertheless, given how there is little else out there to solve this problem, I appreciate this app immensely. I’d just love to see a couple of the above improvements happen sooner than later.

Update: a third problem is becoming prominent where it will not always read a page from top to bottom, but skips all over a page wherever fonts change, or even to a later page. Upon testing and inspection, it is not merely an ocr issue as other readers do not have this issue. In such cases, this app is becoming increasingly unusable.

by Vulgar Demos

My fault, I suppose, for not doing due diligence but I don’t really think this app’s features reflects its price. It is simply an interface for built-in text-to-speech system feature on iOS (with the option of purchasing additional voices which are better but, of course, never as good in practice as the promotional audio samples suggest). Without this app, you can already tell Siri to read you anything, and you can even change the frequency/pitch using free apps (like Apple’s own Workflow app), so this app doesn’t really add much. Voice Dream Reader doesn’t really do what I was hoping it would do, like be smart about not reading footers (which can be very long). If I can quickly delete footers with a simple regex workflow (I’m not a programmer) before it speaks text, then surely this app’s developers can, too? Their pdf margin editor is very difficult to work—surprising given that this app geared to improve digital accessibility. I like the tap gestures, but other than that, this I app doesn’t really add much value to system features, certainly not the kind of value suggested by the price.

by Kk_ss_jj

I think it’s pretty disingenuous to say “36 built-in iOS voices in 27 languages are also available for free” when you can’t use them without paying $80/year. I’m also getting increasingly fed up with apps that do everything possible to hide their true cost. After creating an account, you are presented with a full-screen pop-up to start a subscription. There is no way to leave this screen unless you close the app. You can’t even look at the app unless you agree to the subscription. The trial is one of the shortest I’ve seen on the App Store at just 3 days. They also advertise the subscription as “$6.66/month” despite only billing annually, again trying to obfuscate the true cost of the app. So if you’re expecting to have a $6.66 charge each month, I hope you’re prepared to actually spend $80 all at once. And then even if you do pay for the subscription, they charge an additional $5 for some of the voices.

I played the demo for a lot of the voices and was NOT impressed. That all sounded very robotic and unnatural.

There are features that I think would be really cool, like queuing up a list of documents/pages/books so that it automatically moves to the next in the list as you finish each document, but nothing I saw justified the high cost of the app. Especially when the best voices I came across were the newer “Enhanced” Siri voices that come with iOS.