Speech central, migrating from Voice Dream and how to logon to bookshare, please help?

If this can be done, preferably in bulk, I'd like to be able to do it. I have over 1,000 books on VoiceDream.

Hello,
You cannot log into bookshare from within the app. You will need to download books from the website in epub format and then import them into the app. It is a straightforward process. I use my mac to download them and then I place them in my iCloud drive downloads folder. Once they are there, I select import from the speech central menu and navigate to my downloads folder in the files app. Once in the files app, I find the book and double tap on it to import it into speech central. It really does not take all that long to do it this way. You can also just use safari on your phone or tablet to download the books right into the downloads folder on your device.

If what I remember reading is right, you have to download bookshare books and them send them to the app for now. It used to be able to access Bookshare directly, but there was some issue, and I don't think newer versions do it. The author may be working on a library import from VoiceDream, at least that's what another thread indicated.

If you can get all your files into the Downloads folder or some other folder your iOS device can access, you can load multiple books into the app from the files app. Simply select all the files you want and hit share then choose Speech Central and it'll load everything you selected.

you *might* have to restart Speech Central to see them, it's a problem I'm currently having, but it does work.

The latest version has both folder import (that will import file from all sub folders so you can import compatible formats from your complete Voice Dream library).

Also as a new option you can import multiple files from a single folder using the standard dialogue.

There is no Bookshare import option (it was available for 7 years but with less than 10 books downloaded in most of the months by all users I had to ask users to download manually from the website. One thing to note is that I have suggested Bookshare that they should implement the share option in their app so that you could export to Speech Central or some other apps in just few clicks. That is at the maximum one working day from their engineers and people are paying $80/year for their service so they should provide some reasonable experience.

Why are things like that and why they have actively discouraged use of Speech Central is an interesting story. When I said that to their CEO he didn’t say it isn’t correct, he just said that each educator may prefer some app and he has the right to communicate his preferences and opinions to the users, he can’t do anything regarding that. Possibly not that wording, but that was the point.

I just imported 2000 books from my VDR library into Speech central. It took quite a while. incidentally, does the screen have to remain on for pending operations to continue, or can I carge the phone while downloading such a lorge number of files?

I would expect iOS to pause operations at some point if the screen is off. However if you play the content it shouldn’t stop so you can possibly play the content to workaround that.

I can’t fully promise as it is work in progress, but I will try to support DAISY files again.

I had some work today and temporarily I gave up but I think that I can complete that work in the next week.

However if there it turns out that what I considered today as a big road block is really a big road block then this will be postponed significantly. But as said I do think that there is the solution just I need to ensure that it actually works.

The bulk upload options don’t appear in the iPad version I closed and reopened the app to make sure. I’m on an iPad Pro 2018.

My apologies; appparently the app hadn’t fully updated. The option is present and accounted for on iPad.

I can’t find the answer to this anywhere but is there a way to read a book continuously instead of having to manually go to the next chapter?

The app will read chapters continuously. That is how it is expected to be used and how it is used by most of the people (97% of users aren’t visually impaired and they use it mostly this way and for this functionality).

If you want to browse the books with VoiceOver which is a tool to help in visual browsing some browsing tasks like moving to the next chapter are expected.

While this will never be the preferred way of using the app, I’ll try to make it easier by adding the button to go to the next chapter on the bottom of chapter text which would make it more seamless.

I just came to that idea so I can’t say exactly when it will be implemented but it certainly does qualify as something that should be done.

I think I must not have been very clear in my question. The app reads chapter by chapter just fine, but I want to read the whole book without having to interact with anything once I've started reading. Is there a way to do that? I haven't found one so far but I could be missing something.

I've noticed that when I use Voices in Speech central, when reading a book the voices act as if they're being ducked i.e; the reading voices is always lower than the phone/iPad default voice, whether audio ducking is on or not. Is there a way to fix this? Also, is there a way to adjust the voice speed in smaller increments?

Regarding the chapters, if you use the app’s player to listen to the content it should proceed to the next chapter. I have tested it with VoiceOver on and also with AutoPlay off so none of those could lead to that. It could be that some other accessibility setting may influence this as I have a slight feeling that someone reported something similar before, but in such specific case other people here are more likely to provide the proper answer on what it may be than what I can.

My personal experience is that pitch audio processing effects in iOS 17 are significantly worse than before and they may lead to such an effect.

As such any change in the pitch could lead to that, even minimal ones. As Settings > Speech > Advanced > Emulate book narration may make such subtle (or even more notable) changes in pitch, I assume you would want to disable that setting.

Regarding the speed you should be able to make fine adjustments with speed sliders in the Settings, I have tested that once and it worked properly with VoiceOver, how ever I don’t know instructions on how to do that, I have found them in standard VoiceOver manual or some website that describes that.

Good to know it's supposed to read chapters continuously. I don't know why it stops for me. I'll have to play around with it some more and see if that ressolves itself.