Hello,
soon there will be 10 years from the release of the first version of Speech Central (at that point it was called Share to Speech and was released for Windows).
As part of that event a completely new version of Speech Central for iOS and macOS rewritten from the scratch is being prepared.
It features more than thousand of improvements. In this post I won't announce the list of those improvements, but I do announce that this is getting few months from the final release (the current expectation is January 2024) and things are getting close to production level, so beta testing is now opened.
There is some more information regarding the beta testing here: https://speechcentral.net/2023/11/17/beta-testing-of-the-next-gen-of-speech-central/ , but those that want to go ahead immediately can just use this link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/XrOTSdnm
While the accessibility is certainly even better at the conceptual level, some testing and feedback would be highly appreciated! Of course reports on any other problems are highly appreciated too!
Comments
Voice settings are confusing
Hi,
I don't know how the "random" option works, but when I go to the voice settings, I have these buttons in the following order: "Random", "Multiselect", "Voice". Multiselect sounds self-explanatory, but what does the "Voice" button do? Was it also there in the official version?
Okay, got what the Voice button did, but...
The button might just be renamed to something like "More Options...". If it's only relabeling for VoiceOver that has to be done, then this should be easier.
RE: Voice settings are confusing
The only new button is 'Random', previously this was managed as part of the list (at least on iOS, on the Mac it was closer to this solution).
I am not sure if the last button is titled differently in the current version. In the beta it is titled to reflect the visual appearance which I find as correct, but it could be that this may be confusing from VoiceOver perspective and that title "More..." may be more appropriate.
Thanks, got it.
Another suggestion: When clicking this "Voice" button that I proposed to change to "More...", we get a popup window with various options like voice provider, gender and quality. Is it possible that you have VoiceOver read out these options as follows?
- "Apple, 1 of 2"
- "Microsoft Neural Voices, 2 of 2"
- "All, 1 of 3"
- "Male, 2 of 3"
- "Female, 3 of 3"
- "All, 1 of 2"
- "High, 2 of 2"
- "Exclude Robots"
I would love to refer to another instance where VoiceOver reads out multiple groups of such buttons in this way for better clarity, but can't recall any right now.
* Another note: You may also change the option "High" to "HQ", which makes it more clear that it's the quality that is "high".
RE:
Thanks, this is a very good reasoning!
I have just tried the iOS Files app that has a similar menu and it appears to do the same as my current beta, but I agree that that's not the ideal experience.
The good thing is that this part is already handled by my custom component, so "teaching" it to do this trick won't be too hard.
It should be in the next beta version which is likely to be published in the next week.
New version
There is the new version today that addresses all the feedback, including few crashes and improved accessibility (the issues mentioned here and few more that I have noted - now VoiceOver indicates the 'on' state of few buttons).
What is the case on the Mac?
I downloaded the TestFlight app and I accepted the beta testing terms, however the app does not show in the Applications in my Mac, I can see it in the TestFlight app but not in my Mac. Am I doing something wrong or what?
Concerned about the Testing
So on my iPad, I get this message:
Do you want to replace the current app version with the test version? You may lose the app’s data.
So I have a ton of books on my iPad and I am afraid I may lose my books if I proceed with the installation. Any idea how to proceed with the testing without losing my data?
RE: What is the case on the Mac?
Currently there is not beta testing on the Mac. To make a spoiler, it is submitted to Apple but it is in the approval process and that process if frozen for the holidays...
I will publish in the Mac forum when it is ready
RE: Concerned about the Testing
If Apple warns you that it may happen, I can't say that it is impossible as they have more data on that than me.
As far as I can tell, and I think that people here can confirm, this isn't something that one should expect to happen and I would guess that it requires some accident to happen.
Certainly you can avoid the risk by having either iCloud backup of the device or the backup of the device on your Mac and restoring it if something goes wrong.
can we use it for the third party speech for voiceover
my question is:
can we use the voices for the third party voice over speech?
RE:
Speech Central isn't the app that provides voices. You can use either Apple's voices (that you can use with VoiceOver) or Microsoft's voices (that you can't use with VoiceOver).
Problem with bookshare
Hello,
Since I installed the beta I am unable to download from bookshare. When I choose the add button and select bookshare it just sendms me back out to my list of books. When I go into extras then log in items there is nothing listed here. I have tried uninstalling the beta and reinstalling but the problem persists. What else might I try to fix the issue or is this a bug?
Yes, the issues I mentioned earlier, are gone.
The "More" option is missing the "..." at the end, and a pause between the option and the "x/y" could be better, but the experience is fairly good as it is. Still, I don't get why the "Voice" button in the settings is shown with "1" beside it. I would also like to know how I can customize the voice and other parameters for languages other than the system default.
"more" with lower-case "m"
The "Books & Articles" section has a "more" button that should have a capital "M" at the beginning. Quite a subtle detail to some, but I also realized it coincidentally.
The "Folder..." button should be changed to "New Folder".
I found a mysterious "Folder..." button under the "Archive" tab, and found out that it would make a text field show up along with two nice buttons named "Cancel" and "OK", as well as a window title ("Add Folder"), which were all items on a screen that would let me create a new folder, as I had guessed before double-tapping on it.
RE: Problem with bookshare
At the same time that you wrote the comment regarding the Bookshare I made a post that explains the current state: https://www.applevis.com/forum/ios-ipados/bookshare-speech-central
Re: "more" with lower-case "m"
This button is generated by the Apple's framework.
The app is only declaring toolbar items and those that are declared as secondary can be shown in the overflow menu that is generated by Apple when buttons can't fit the screen. It could be that they made the wrong title to it, you can report that to them.
I might consider in the future to have a custom solution as I don't like that there is no divider in this menu and there are enough buttons that divider might be welcome, which would make it possible to create my own button that would have a proper title.
RE: Yes, the issues I mentioned earlier, are gone.
Thanks for confirming that improvement has been made.
The number after the voices indicates the number of selected voices. In general if you select just one voice it will be shown by its name. There is one case when it is still a number, I don't remember why at the moment as I made that feature many months ago (but I think that it is if you have multiselect on).
Regarding the setup of voices, there is information in the app's help: https://speechcentral.net/ios-help/#azure
Unfortunately I can't provide the link at the feature page as Apple would consider that I am trying to boost potential sales of a digital product and would require that I sell that from the app so that Apple can have its cut from that...
Got your points.
Thanks for devoting your time to respond to the feedback we provide. I will try to provide further feedback as I use and test the app. The early beta is quite stable, so my experience has not been impacted.
RE: The "Folder..." button should be changed to "New Folder".
This will be fixed for the folder, the icon was made to be different on whether the button is in Books & Articles (where it is in the Add menu so Folder is appropriate) or in the Archive, but the title wasn't.
What does this app do?
A previous comment said it was not used to select VoiceOver voice. So if not, what is it used for?
Thanx.
RE: What does this app do?
As this is the post about the beta testing there was no link to the app description thus far and you can find all information there: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/speech-central-ai-voice-reader/id1127349155
iOS 16 fix
This was most notable problem on the beta thus far - that on the iOS 16 only one tab was available and thus the app couldn’t be used.
If anyone here was affected, it is fixed now.
Microsoft neural voices
Would it be possible for clearer instructions to be made for the Microsoft neural voices to be able to run? I have my Microsoft Azure account created, but I can’t figure out what to do from there and the instructions in the app aren’t super helpful lol any help would be appreciated.
Re: neural voices
I am not sure if you have followed the link above. If you haven’t then it is likely to resolve your problem.
I assume that is the case and then it can’t be provided in more details in the app as it would cause Apple to want the cut from your eventual payment for the service which would mean that I would have to resell the service and that would be quite bad for users, most notably no free tier as I get I would get only one free tier for all users.
If you’ve read the link please specify in which step you had the problem.
If you’re talking about the link in the app
If you were talking about the link to the help article in the app, I have already read that where I’m struggling is after my account is created I can’t tell what to do next like for example, when I create a new resource or whatever it needs what do I fill in to be able to get the correct thing For Speech Central
RE:
You have two links in the help article. The other one brings you exactly to the form to create the resource, here is the link: https://portal.azure.com/#create/Microsoft.CognitiveServicesSpeechServices
Otherwise I do agree that it is fairly complicated if you try to create the resource from their portal directly.
Well, after a long time, I got it figured out
Well, after like three hours of playing around with it, I did manage to get it connected. I think the Microsoft voices now I just have a few more questions. The first one is can the app play epub files. I tried to import one into the Speech Central app but then when I go into it, everything is dimmed out including the play pause button. Also, are you able to read emails in the app when I drop one in like the Help article says I get this error.
Cannot load representation of type public.url
RE:
If the play button is disabled it is one of regular states with Microsoft voices. In the new version I have also add the loading indicator inside that button but it could be that I've missed to make it accessible.
To conclude, Microsoft voices are loading speech from the internet and the loading state is a regular thing as such. If for some reason it is not possible and you have disabled "Fallback to Apple voices" it will keep trying to load and it may last indefinitely in that specific combination.
Technically it could be possible that disable state comes for some other reason, but I cannot make any better guess based on this description.
The help page is made for the regular version. While more than 90% can be applied, some things can't. The .eml files are not supported at the moment, I can't say whether that will be available in the future as this is again one area of extremely low usage (less than 1% of 1% of Speech Central usage and I would guess even those mostly out of curiosity) and it is hard to justify the effort.
That makes more sense
OK that makes more sense as to why the epubfile wasn’t working and that makes sense for the email thing. Just a word of suggestion, though you seem to base a lot of your feature things on percentage of use which I guess makes sense somewhat but keep in mind too a lot of the reason that people may not use these features is because they don’t know about them, I personally never really explored this app all the way through before so I never knew that you could even import emails into it so short, I guess what I’m trying to say is not everybody may know about the capabilities of the app or even use the app for that matter just because only one percent of blind people use that feature that doesn’t mean that Moore wouldn’t if it was highlighted I personally think it would be really useful to have for when you get emails shared with you that are entire articles and you want something that can just read out the article to you outloud and not all email programs do this the only one that I know about that does is outlook and it’s only for certain types of accounts, Gmail, and none of the other ones do it
RE:
Thanks for your honest and constructive feedback.
Regarding the email specifically, it was "advertised" as it was available in the "Add" menu among other item types and if someone clicked it would lead him to the description. But even this hasn't resulted in some big uptake...
I understand
I understand I know personally that’s some thing I would probably use because I get email articles sent to me daily that I would love to be able to read out loud especially with Microsoft high-quality voices which you can’t get in any other apps at least not any I’m aware of
Problem on MacOS
So the app has been updated today and I get the following message: your Mac is incompatible with this app. Now THat's an M1 macOS and I believe this is mistakenly reported as another Mac. How to fix this? I want to submit various reports and I wish that to be before the final release of the app.
RE: Problem on MacOS
If you talk about the beta testing, the requirement since the beginning of it was and still is that macOS Ventura is the minimum version.
As such every M1 Mac can be capable to run the app if its operating system was updated, but if it wasn't then it is possible that it can't.
Mine is Sonoma
I have Sonoma, and it did not give the same message before, I installed the ap app perfectly fine earlier but with the latest update I am getting this message.
RE:
As TestFlight is Apple’s app, I don’t know how it works.
But basically it should check the metadata of the software and compare to your system.
I have checked and metadata is still the same, Ventura is still minimal version and both architectures are supported (and even if they were not M1 can still emulate old architecture). It doesn’t require any particular device or hardware characteristics.
So it is likely that something has changed on your system other than the update of Speech Central.
RE:
I have tried it now, and it works, it says "Works on this Mac" for my M2 Pro with Sonoma.
One thing to note is that if you click on the link of the iOS app beta (in this thread) you will receive the information that it is "Incompatible on this Mac", which is correct. Maybe you did that?
Bug with Microsoft Voices
Hi,
Right now there's a pretty serious bug when trying to use MS voices with Speech Central. The audio generated sounds like it's been compressed with some kind of time stretching algorithm, I'm not really sure what's going on there. This should be fixed before release if possible.
Other than that I love the beta so far, design is pretty nice. Thank you so much for all your hard work. I really appreciate it.
RE: Bug with Microsoft Voices
Got that bug for Microsoft voices, you were right. The idea was to use the iPhone built-in sound processing to simulate different pitch levels, but it turns out that this produces artifacts so this will be removed (this isn't possible in the current official version either). However I do have the plan to have a switch that will allow the pitch to work, just it will require sending of meta data which basically means that each request would consume twice more characters than before.
While the app is overall fairly stable now, some issues are still being encountered. Those issues require either some unlikely racing situation (when the match of two things can cause the crash, but such match is unlikely to happen) or some specific not too frequent configuration of the reading content. As such it is still essential to keep testing.
RE: Bug with Microsoft Voices
I have switched to less advanced but more reliable technologies to play Microsoft voices, so in the new version you should notice a much better quality.
Some trade-offs are that now you can't set the pitch for them.
Where is Azure API key stored on device?
Hi there,
I haven't tried this with the beta version, but with the regular version of Speech Central from the App Store, if I've entered an azure API key to use those voices, when I delete the app and reinstall the API key is still retained. Where is this stored? Are you setting this as an environment variable similar to how you would do it when programming and python? Is there anyway to remove it entirely without doing erase all content and settings?
Thanks.
RE: Key
Key is stored in the device dedicated secure storage (where passwords should be stored) called KeyChain.
I agree that Apple should delete app's entries from KeyChain as part of uninstall process as it is technically possible and more than reasonable thing to do, but it doesn't.