Voice Dream Reader for iOS is now $59.99/year

i just downloaded speech central for the first time to test it out given the crazyness regarding voicedream reader, but any time i try to access articles in pocket for example, or even refresh the screen after opening it, it crashes out. no idea why it's doing that, given it's a fresh install and all. but right now it's not a usable option

My understand is that VoiceOver users automatically get the Pro features of Speech Central, such as the ability to add multiple books.

This is because the app recognises when VoiceOver is enabled. When you go to the Settings screen with VoiceOver enabled you will find a button to make a $9.99 donation. With VoiceOver off, that button says something to the effect of buy the Pro version for $9.99. The restore purchases button is also disabled when VoiceOver is enabled.

Thanks very much for clarifying the above. I'd forgotten about the free tier for Azure. I kept meaning to give it a try with Speech Central but, honestly, I've just been too lazy! (Please insert a better excuse here if you can think of one)

Although it is a bit of a pain to setup, I like the fact that you provide this option in this way. It feels very fair and reasonable.

it was on mastodon it is $5.99 a month.

I also noticed on the announcement link posted above that you can get a 25% lifetime discount by following a link and doing something or other. I think the problem is that any subscription is too much when you have purchased something in good faith.

I'd also be a bit suspect of the word "lifetime" as they seem to have a slightly different definition of the word to me. I read that as "for now".

Even if voice dream reader has a monthly price of 5.99, or let's be honest, that is 6 dollars a month, if you payed monthly, you'd still be paying $72 for the app in a year, which, yeah its a little bit less than $80, but it is still shafting of the customers, when it comes down to it. This is as much as a streaming Service subscription, depending on the streaming service, discovery comes to mind. I'm sorry but having a book reader app cost that much is ridiculous. I'll leave a review of this as well.
Re, to the person using kindle and audible... Kindle and audible also shaft their users. When you buy the book, the book comes protected with drm; and yet, you didn't rent, the book; you bought, the book. Meaning that with the book being protected by drm you still don't own it, even though the website in amazon and audible labels the button as buy; not, rent. Its another form of shafting their customer bace, and its why I stopped buying books from kindle, ibooks, etc, and when I do buy the books, I still remove the drm on my own so I can read the books where I want, i.e, speech central or another app. I bought the book, I shouldn't have to be forced to read it on just x app or be locked down; after all, acording to your site; I pressed buy; I didn't press rent on the book, but yeah. Kindle and audible also shaft their customer bace.

Kindle and audible aren't perfect sure. But I don't know of a reliable way of getting eBooks and audiobooks. I do google sometimes if I really want an eBook I think is a bit too expensive to buy, but it's luck of the draw whether I'll find it or not. There's Bookshare and Scribd. Scribd is kind of expensive though per month! There's the RNIB library here in the UK, but I'm fussy with narrators, and they don't have the original narrators for a lot of stuff, they use other people. I don't know what they have in the way of eBooks. I did look on their site, but they didn't seem to have much stuff, but maybe I was looking in the wrong place? Bookshare seem to have more stuff.
I used to remove the DRM from Kindle books, but I can't find an easy way of doing it these days. I looked into calibre but it looks pretty complicated to set up. But audible yes, I do remove the DRM sometimes, it depends whether I really want something on my computer. I'd much rather use my computer to listen to stuff sometimes.

How do you remove DRM from Audible books. I have bought over 3000 books at huge cost but as stated above, I don’t really own them because although I spent money on them I can’t use them as I choose like i would be able to with an actual book. It’s a very strange situation when you think about it that you can buy something and yet not own it. Great example how that can be a problem is when you buy an application on your phone then some investment company does an Elon and buys what they think is an asset then sets about ruining their new asset which human beings rely on. Moving to subscription everything might be very attractive for investors but people don’t want it, can’t afford it and when pushed too far will push back… Real REAL hard.

Honestly I just go to a site where books are uploaded without drm and download the book from there. As far as audible drm, i'm not sure how to do it, I think kaliber does that too, but not sure. I think there was a program called something like epuber which did it, but frankly I listen to books with voiceover, audiobooks don't do it for me much.
The problem with all of this is that kindle, ibooks etc, aren't being honest. If the button said rent, you'd know what your getting; your renting a book but, when it says buy, but for all intent's and purposes you don't own what bought but your mearly renting it, per the drm? Yeah no. The company is not only shafting; but is also lying to you as the customer, which is all sorts of wrong.

"open Audible" will strip the DRM from Audible books, and convert them to mp3 or m4b. It's accessible on mac, but I haven't checked the windows version. The address is:
https://openaudible.org

https://cdn.tweesecake.social/cache/media_attachments/files/112/169/061/264/221/856/original/9d17d2ddfbda31eb.mp3

I have to make a quick correction. The pricing given of $59/year and $5.99/month was only if you subscribe outside of Apples walled garden.

Here in the UK the actual pricing is £79 which is $99.70/year.

Jonathan has always been exceptional at walking a fine line when talking about this kind of thing. He is IMHO giving far too much benefit of the doubt considering what Voicedream have promised and then gone back on. Thats unacceptable but JM mostly let them off by saying they may have broken trust.

I appreciate his very calm appraisal but disagree that this is just something for the market to work out. In reality he’s right but that doesn’t mean I can’t have very strong views about it. I know people who bought this app and rely on it. They cannot afford $100 a year for a simple reading app and asking that price is profiteering IMHO. I don’t know this companies finances but I do know users didn’t ask for those voices to be bundled, they aren’t using Mac and they already bought the voices they use so there’s no value add at all for them, only extra cost which once again was promised not to be charged.

I honestly think if they hadn’t been so greedy about this and had communicated better that this wouldn’t have been anywhere near as bad for them. Maybe $20/year or $1.99 a month might have been something people could have absorbed without impacting their lives but thats not what happened.

I hope a better middle ground can be found because the binary options of this is too expensive so they fail and it goes away or its the best thing that ever happened to them leaves people I know without software they have come to rely on. They don’t work but get a lot of pleasure from reading. They already paid and bought the voices they like and were promised that was the end of it. Just because a company buys something shouldn’t mean they have the right to pilot it into a mountain.

I respect Jonathan but in this case I think he was slightly off the line he usually walks very well. I know he needs to keep communication open, thats the foundation of his business but I think a little too much slack was given here. Again just an opinion.

Time will tell whether voicedream have piloted themselves into a mountain but I hope they take Jonathan up on his offer and come explain what the heck they’re thinking.

I completely agree with you. that $5.99 option is no where on the app store hear in the states. I think they could've gotten $3 to $5 no problem. It was how they didn't communicate that is the big problem. They are also forcing us to pay for a mac version. Well what if I don't have a mac? Why should I fund something I don't have? I strongly encourage them to try and save face and go on the Living Blindfully podcast and explain their flip-flop and let the chips fall where they may.

They may well be planning something like that but without evidence, I wouldn’t want to accuse. I think this was a simple miscalculation of the value of their app. They wanted to maximise return on their investment but didn’t consider there are people involved that just can’t afford what they’re proposing.

I also wouldn’t be taken in by such a ploy. They have lied, pure and simple and that doesn’t get resolved with a price drop.

They promised their users access to the features they’d already paid for. A row back doesn’t change the fact they lied and tried to sweep everyone up in the new pricing with no justification.

If they want to go develop new features and charge people for those features then as JM said, let the market decide but legacy users who’d already paid didn’t ask for those new features and frankly I don’t trust a single word they say.

It’s a very sad sequence of events for what was a well respected app.

I’m starting to have a visceral reaction to hearing this. Everyone is just selling a single cup of coffee a month as justification for their subscription pricing. Well I don’t drink coffee and if I did I wouldn’t be buying coffee at $8 which is what the UK Apple Store pricing works out at. I wouldn’t even be buying $4 coffee because thats vastly over priced. I’d be buying coffee for $2.50 which is reasonable but the justification really doesn’t hold up when you think about it. If I’d bought 40 cups of coffee instead of 1 years access to VD reader, I’d have drunk 40 cups of coffee, sat in a coffee shop for maybe 30 hours, they’d have heated that shop and provided lighting and staff. It’s just nonsense and I wish everyone would stop with this just a cup of coffee rubbish. They add up quickly and don’t cost what the justification claims anyway.

Well, if they can ask people who bought it to pay then where do you draw the line. Will anyone who bought a house be willing to pay for it to stay there fifty years later? And if they lied about it as said here before then any moves going forward would have to be questioned. Your word should be your word and important but it mean nothing these days. And yes, the problem is that even if you pay one dollar and you have to pay those for more and more apps then somewhere it will get difficult, and what many people don't understand is that for some people its hard to have enough funds in your account consistently and you have to keep battling each time a subscription didn't go off and fix it. Yes you get a few days or weak to get money and let the payment fru but the more subscriptions you must pay for the more this can happen and you have to keep track of it all. And this is so expensive that if compared to easy reader premium then I will take their option rather as dolphin handle the subscription and not apple. I like the fact that they use an account basis to make it work. I was never in favor of the library concept voicedrea uses because the larger it get it can get corrupt and for some or even all users it leave files behind after you delete files you don't need wich can be seen under iphone/ipad storage. Not a good move.

This coffee thing they always mention is just as stupid as everyone saying only 5.99 or only 8.99. Its trying to fool your brain.

I hope they reverse this decision. They’re taking away features that users have paid for, forcing not only to pay again, but also require a subscription. Why won’t they create a separate app, or make it optional paid upgrade for new features? If they abandon the app today, and put no more resources into it, letting it slowly die out - I’ll guess I’ll be fine with that, too. But not this! Not forced subscription for already-paid-for features! That is just not cool.

nope. Why should I pay to read documents that I can just go to my computer and read for free? or use dolphin easy reader or some other app.

I think there is probably a wider discussion to be had at some point about how apps can best fund themselves long-term. In the old days I would use a piece of software for a while, then a new major version would come out. I could continue using the old one or I could decide to upgrade to the new version, usually with a discount. This always seemed quite fair to me - the developer would have to keep enticing me to the new version with exciting new features like with the subscription model but it gave me the choice.

I think the Apple eco-system doesn't naturally lend itself towards that. For starters, Apple seems to be a lot less concerned with backwards compatibility than Microsoft were in the day (and possibly still are?) I don't know how much truth there really is that an app needs significant resources to keep running as Apple updates iOS. I'm guessing it's neither nothing nor huge. And then the nature of the app store again doesn't really do anything here - you just have to start with an al-new app.

I've seen it before, for example with lire. It's a small inconvenience to upgrade but it feels like a good and fair model to me.

Whereas I think a one-off fee probably doesn't really help the developer. If I buy something for a couple of quid ten years ago and am still using it then how sustainable is that really?

On the other hand it is totally crazy if we move to the situation where we are having to subscribe to all apps.

It seems to me that the only good middle-ground is to optionally pay for major upgrades. And I accept subscriptions when there is an obvious server-cost but I may well choose not to bother. A well-designed app should, in my opinion, make that part optional.

I think there is also the possibility that this has all come from a basic miscalculation. Maybe they are wanting to rinse us for every penny, but also maybe they genuinely can't afford to keep the app going with the old model. I remember Winston talking about those challenges in the past and that he wanted to make the app sustainable so that it could continue even when he was no longer involved in it.

With a lot of these things it's about communication. I worked somewhere where I had to take a pay cut, but the managing director had stood up in front of the company and gone through all the finances, explained how the directors were also taking cuts and in that kind of environment you think, well that's not great but it's fair enough.

I believe that Winston would have been on here talking to us about it, whereas the absence of the devs on here is noticeable.

Anyway, I realise I am playing devil's advocate a little here. I enjoyed Jonathan Mosen's thoughts on it as it brought a different perspective to mine at the time.

But that aside, I think that this is the easy and wrong option. I think it would have worked fine to add the subscription model on top of the existing app to allow you access to new features but to keep the ones you have. Or move to a new major version. So despite all my waffle I still feel cheated and am still intending to write my 1-star review.

Winston communicated. I'll just say what I think this companies attitude is they don't give a shit about us the users. Where is the communication? Where is the engagement with the community? Where is the back and forth this is why we have to charge. How can we work together?

I sent an email to them this morning (after hearing nothing from subscribing on their website) and cancelled. I told them even though VoiceDream is the best app for text reading, I have no use for a Mac version or new voices, and I did pay once already. I might pay for a major new version, but I have too many subscriptions already.

Even if I can afford one more subscription, there are a lot of people benefiting from Voicedream who can't afford another $60 a year for the privilege. I suspect the new strategy will result in somebody going broke, which maybe they were doing already, but promising me stuff I'll never use to keep me paying isn't going to cut it.

I bought vdr over 10 years ago now, and have honestly probably used it at least once a week since. I could deal with a subscription model if they actually added new features, made it more affordable or improved the app in any way. The subscription has been around for a year already, and the app has gone through no significant changes or improvements. If I'm being charged for the "privilege" of reading a book on bookshare, a service which is already charging me a yearly subscription, I expect braille support to actually work reliably. I expect audio to reliably keep playing when I lock my phone. Things like this have been happening for a long time, and I guess its time for me to finally get on with figuring out how to crack drm on kindle books so I can just stick them on my braille display.

I think a model where we pay for significant upgrades is a fair one. It incentivises devs to keep coming up with reasons to buy the new product as it adds useful features. Just being charged over and over at BTW a very inflated rate even compared with single purchase software isn’t a situation I’m happy with or think is in any way fair.

I heard of VoiceDream for quite awhile starting in 2016 when I got my first iPod Touch 6 and my first personal apple product that was truely mine, not my first voiceover experience though as I had an old iphone 4 for 2 years back in the good old days of technology.
The only added value VoiceDream provided me, and still did until I heard this non sence, is the accapela tts voices. As you probably know here on applevis especially accapela group doesn't care much about their tts and screen reader usage. Their addon for nvda does exist but is a pure garbage, their ui for license is half accessible with doubled html elements for buy and enter license key (and we're talking about a .nvda-addon that is not fully accessible which is wild)...
Anyway, I bought, get refunded, bought, get refunded (yes), and finally ractually bought VoiceDream in the beginning of 2023 for $cad45, tax included.
I enjoied for 1.5 years a higher quality margo (french female voice) wich crazy high pitch that can't be found anywhere else. Why is this an added value for me? Because if I were to acquire the sdk to code my own tts for screen reader or other apps (assuming I have the skillset for that, which is not the case currently), it would have cost me 600$ just for the sdk. + I think for any commercial use after we have to share a percentage with Accapela but I am not sure at all about this. All this to say that, yes, I liked VoiceDream for what it brought me.
If they have to share a cut with accapela voice for each purchase and grant the first voice free, it's still about $6 they can subtract after 45-15"-"30% from apple, + the cut they give to accapela. Roughly, more than $20, assuming users don't just use a system voice instead for reading, which... voiceover can already do on easyreader I think but it's not the point of my message.
The only biggest problem I have with this app, is an apparent synchronization problem with icloud when we throw more than 20 .txt plain text ascii file, which is nor a synchronization problem, neither an icloud, or internet issue.
From what I understand, and please correct me here as I never tried uploading other than plain text file, is that, for whatever reason, for each upload, whether we select a file from iphone file browser within the app, or just send a file in the icloud reader/loader (which I discovered is now called voicedream library / loader with donotdeletethisfile.txt everywhere :P ), voicedream would do a very weird preprocessing of those files, and this is what create all this sync issue, purely crashes the app and force a user to put 10-15 files at a time and then wait vd to complete its things in the hope that the ui on the app sync well actually with the background and everything is actually complete, which is not always the case. I am an old victor reader stream2 user with 600+ .txt files which are more than 600mb in size. Decent library, but nothing too crazy, especially, for, a paid, reading, app! If you noticed these files are then moved to the library folder with hexadecimal folder names in which we have 1 file one by one an with a .json next to it.
I am not aware if this issue has been corrected since they have disclosed this new pricing. It has not been corrected since they first announced the subscription model as far as I know.
So no, unless they:
1 Bring the accapela tts voices to the mac app
2 Correct this crazy sync problem which prevented me recommending this app to anyone in the past and especially now
I am not giving them a shit of my money. This is a pure scamm at most. + they started doing app tracking, surveying user about their intended usage of the app, + more or less force users to create an account for the app with no reason as to why as the sync already happens with icloud even if it's broknen and they could easyly put a couple of files there if needed to sync per voice and app settings to each device. Moreover! TThe subscription and which user have paid what privilege is already tied to one's apple id. So why the need for an account then?
Let me know what you think!

Importing library is a very clever move with perfect timing. Maybe these are the market forces Jonathan was talking about? Can I request the ability to play audiobooks too please? I know you’ve had this request before but that would make Speech Central the full package. I know it’s not a small thing to do and may not be something you’re prepared to do with your app but just in case 1 more request tips the scale. I thought I’d mention it.

I can't use eloquence as my default voice. I did follow the instructions. can this please be checked. Can you also support word docs pdf and audio books please? Thanks.

Will you be adding audio books and bookshare?

The app "book player" is excellent for audio books, and you only have to go pro if you want cloud sync or want to donate to development. It's free and open source.

can someone please do a podcast on this? In particular I'm having issues getting the right voice to read.

so someone is having trouble with your app and this is your response It will be removed and I will not recommend it to anyone!!!!!!
you assumed I did not go into settings and change it I did!!!!!!!!!!!! You assume I didn't follow your instructions!!!!!!!!!!!!! I did!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You wonder why people don't donate to your app? Your poor attitude which once again is on display for all to see is why!!!! You attack users instead of helping them!!!!!!!!!! YOU CERTAINLY DON'T KNOW CUSTOMER SERVICE

I just got an email stating that everyone, not just new customers, will be switched over to the subscription model. I enjoyed the app, and have hundreds of books there. Sadly, I can't afford yet another subscription, so I will have to bid this one goodbye and thanks for the good times. A real shame,.

We'll see if they go on any podcast and explain there position or offer a monthly rate. if they do those things I might reconsider my take.

Tayo, I got the same email that everyone will be moved to subscription so I’m opting out. I’ve had Voice Dream for years but I hardly ever use it because I like Speech Central better. I paid for my copy of Speech Central and glad I did. It’s a one time fee and does a very good job. I don’t particularly like any of the premium voices in Voice Dream anyway. Nobody should expect someone to work for free and then whine, moan and complain that they aren’t getting enough attention. That’s just arrogant.

The Acapella voices suit my needs very well, and VoiceDream is the only app now that currently has them on my phone. I paid for the app, any any number of voices. Now I'm being told, in effect, that all of my money was for nothing since the new owners want even more of it simply so I can press play to read a book. Maybe I'm being unfair. If so, could somebody explain> If they want to make money, why not create a library from which users can borrow books? that's a time-honored tradition and no one would bat an eyelash. But it just feels wrong to have to pay monthly or year for a tts reader. A subscription for the suite of tools that would include writer I could get behind, But they singled out the tts app, for whatever reason.

They can't make it into a library app because:

• Not everyone who uses the app uses it to read library books. The app can also be used to read textbooks, magazines, news articles, standalone audio files, etc. Limiting how the app can be used will decrease the app's user base.
• This would make the app even more expensive than it already is:
  • Licensing library books costs money.
  • Employing staff to negotiate with publishers costs money.

They can't make it into a bundle with other apps because:

• Applause Group purchased Voice Dream Reader but did not purchase VD Write and VD Scan. That's why the names of the latter apps have changed so significantly.
• Most people who purchase subscriptions to apps do so through in-app purchases. I don't believe that Apple allows deverlopers to purchase a subscription to a bundle of apps.
• If Applause Group has determined that the features of Voice Dream Reader cost $59.99 annually, the subscription cost for the even larger feature set that would come from including other apps would need to be likewise increased.

I don't completely agree with what Applause Group has done; I'm merely explaining why what you've proposed isn't possible.

I wasn't proposing that the app be limited to *just* reading library books. My proposal was that they could offer a dedicated library in addition to what's already there. The app itself would cost money to buy outright, but a library subscription would have to be paid for, similar to Kindle. Anyone can download the Kindle app for free, but the kindle unlimited library costs $10 a month or so.

If Applause want to charge new users this subscription pricing then thats up to them. Then market forces will decide if thats a reasonable price but charging people who have already paid is nothing more than fisting users simply because they bought the keys to the kingdom. It’s wrong, we all know it and frankly I’d expect at least a nice dinner before allowing anyone to do that. It’s only polite. What this means is that any purchase of any application can be simply taken back on a whim and that breaks my trust not only in this company but the entire idea of buying apps and subscribing to every single app we use isn’t sustainable so I don’t know where we go from here.

Release a new version with new features but don’t come back to people who have already paid and expect to hit them up for another payment. Thats how the MAFIA operate, just make up rules to suit their needs but businesses are meant to be better. If I buy a shirt I’d be pretty shocked if the manufacturer showed up at my door asking for a subscription to actually use it. I’d tell them to get to F and I’d be right to do so. Voicedream reader was purchased by people who had an expectation that it couldn’t be taken off them simply to increase a number on a spreadsheet. Furthermore the company who bought the product assured their newly acquired users that nothing would change. They bought the app fair and square. Good old fashioned capitalism could decide whether new users thought the subscription was worth $60/$80/$100 a year depending on location and whether or not they want to give this company who have already proven themselves untrustworthy their payment information and lose the protection that the AppStore promises its users.

This was on Mastodon
I’ve made contact with one of the founders of Applause Group, owners of Voice Dream Reader.
We're scheduled to record tomorrow for Living Blindfully episode 275. It goes to Living Blindfully Plus members on Sunday NZ time, and will be public three days later. You can subscribe to Plus for as little as $1 per month, or whatever you think the podcast is worth to you. I will capture as many of the themes I’ve been reading on social media as possible, and put them to the company.

My point of the synchronization issue, if they corrected that , brought the accapela voices to mac too, as another mentioned they're the only dev with such apps on the appstore I think look just there is 0 option now to have infovox#ivox on mac or other apple products, if they can do these two things, it's an added value for me and I very might subscribe to that if and olny if I have 100% confirmation for that. Am I the only one with this app putting more than 20 files in the library/loader folder and finding voicedream to crash over the last 1.5 year? From friends' feedback it'S been there for year, reported but never corrected even before the purchase.

While I respect the effort of the developers, this ap just isn't important enough for me to justify that amount. I do most of my reading on a PC, and use VoiceDream infrequently if I have to be away from a pc, or if I need something that can play mp3 files and has a sleep timer. The music app on the iPhone can do that just as well.