Speech Central AI Voice Reader

What TTS voices does it use? Are they any good?

Thanks for the response.

Hello,

please, would it be possible to make the Find feature which lets the user search a text in the content of an opened book accessible with VoiceOver? It would be great if the feature, instead of the current implementation, displayed a list of found items where each item would contain a snippet of the text the search term was found inside. Then double-tapping on some item would move the reading position to that occurrence in the book and started playing. Basically, to make it work as in Voice Dream Reader.

The main reason why this could be helpful is that plain text e-books in TXT format typically use some symbols, such as "#" or "X" to denote chapters, and therefore by searching those symbols, one can get a list of chapters. in the book. Or perhaps even better, this feature for listing chapters in TXT file could be separate from the Find feature., so that one could use both the Find and Chapters list feature independently. In any way it would be nice to make the find feature accessible in the first place, similarly as I described.

Best regards

Adam

I did have a plan to add the "Find All" feature in the future which works as you have described, so I'll put it at a higher priority. This was inspired more by apps like Microsoft Word and Adobe Reader though I guess it works in a similar way in all apps that have this feature.

But I think that there might be also better ways to support what you have suggested (titles in txt books). Can you provide some samples to me? If those are copyrighted and can't be sent in full then please just send some samples of those titles.

I don't have any TXT e-book in English which uses such markup. But here is a simple example how it may look like:

# This is the book title
## Introduction
Here could be some paragraph with the introduction about this book.
## How I went to America.
In this chapter, the author may write about his trip to `America. Some very intersting text could be here.
A new paragraph starts here just to demonstrate this example.
## Conclusion
This is the end of this example. I guess no more nonsense is needed to demonstrate my point.

Hello Labsii,

if the "Find next" and "Find previous" functions, that is the possibility to move to the next or previous search occurrence in the book content, were available for custom assignment to buttons in settings, it could also easily solve the problem of navigating by chapter names in a TXT e-book, as described above.

Please, what do you think about this feature?

Adam, I have implemented a function based on your description that should display titles from TXT files in the regular Titles section in Navigation panel. It would be great if you could text if it works as I don't have a file to test.

Hello Labsii,

I have created a simple plain text file with the example contents which I posted in one of my previous comment here, that is, denoting chapters with the # (hash) symbol, but if I display the titles for this text file as you instructed, there is only an empty list. Therefore, How I am supposed to display the list of such chapters? It would be also good to have an option per document to specify which symbol is used for denoting chapters because every e-book uses a different symbol.

Anyway, thanks for implementing this feature. I believe it would be a great addition to Speech Central, something which I quite miss in the Voice Dream Reader app.

Hello Adam,

This sample clearly won't work as it is artificial material that largely misses usual statistics/ratios of the book that are used in the detection. If you have some real sample please check it.

Unfortunately this isn't such a wide spread use case that I would add a setting for it. However I can further improve it based on the feedback.

Could you please explain in other words why this sample is not working?

Actually, I don't have any sample for this function. THe books which I use denote chapters not by the "#" (hash) sign, but using the "X" letter followed by space. It would be nice if user could choose at least between those two characters.

The book shouldn't have more titles than the text.

As this is based on guesses there are always chances of both false positives and false negatives. There are some rules to ensure that false positives are minimized and they can't pass on this sample.

I see. So could you please modify the function to recognise as title the "X" letter instead of "#" (hash) symbol so I can test it?

Adam,

technically it can be done, currently it was set to two characters that I would expect to appear "*" and "#".

However I am not sure if this particular implementation will have the future - I made it with assumption that it is something fairly common in .txt books. While I still have just an assumption now that assumption is opposite. At this point I am more likely into removing this code and implementing Find All feature (which would be implemented anyway sometimes later).

Hello,

in settings > Button functions, for both Books and articles and Headlines, I have configured the Rewind and Forward buttons to navigate to the previous and next sentence, respectively. However, when I move the VoiceOver cursor to the Play/Pause button and swipe up or down, the reading position does not move by sentence but probably by 30 or 60 seconds. Please, how can I configure Voice Reader Speech Central to let me navigate to the next or previous sentence by swiping down or up on the Play/Pause button?

Thanks in advance.

Hello Adam,

thank you for your comment.

Currently the app is designed this way, but I do agree that your suggestion would be a welcome improvement.

I am not sure when this change will be exactly published - as the app is rewritten from the scratch every change to the current app is something that will be discarded in the near feature (likely by the end of the year). Still there might be few maintenance versions by then and as this change isn't too complicated it might appear even before that.

Thanks for the quick reply.

this would be definitely a welcomed feature. Since Voice Dream Reader has turned to the subscription model, many users are now searching for a replacement book reading app, but this lacking feature is what blocks me from using Voice Reader Speech Central, and from recommending it to other users.

I understand your concerns.

I can say that all of those things are being worked on. For example, you have requested for the accessible Find feature. That is also already implemented in the next big version. The same is for this feature, I have immediately checked and implemented it for the next big version.

However the next big version will be result of full year of work and maybe even more and it isn't trivial or easy to estimate when it will be released. Many functions and even many improvements are already implemented. But as many basic necessary functionalities aren't even started this isn't fully functional yet.

I do hope for the November release, soon after Apple publishes the next version of macOS.

Hi

I’m using Speech Central on the iPhone and Mac, and I really like the app. I can select the voices I want, but I can only choose the ones that are on my iPhone. I recently read that it’s possible to add AI voices, but I can’t find that option.
Does anyone know how I can do that?

Thanks

There is the answer for that in the Help article (for Microsoft AI voices):

https://speechcentral.net/ios-help/#azure

I haven't included articles for other AI voices as users should examine them more carefully regarding their pricing and terms (Microsoft AI has a free tier where you won't be charged anything unless you explicitly change to the paid tier). But technically it is the same you need to obtain their API key which requires couple of steps that you can find with internet search.

When I try to find to text in the app I often get no result although I am sure I typed the searched term and the term does exist in the document.
Another thing is the issue with the titles and chapters. I rarely find the app successful in parsing the titles and chapters correctly. For example,, I import a book and I want to see list of chapters I get one title which is often number 1. When I switch to title it shows me also nothing. If it happens and one book content is rendered correctly, I select a chapter to move to but the app does not seem to move to the title I picked from the list.
P.S.: this is on both Mac and iPad.