Description of App
App Store description: Currently only available in English and Italian! A voice aloud reader, completely offline on your device. No internet required, no limits, no subscriptions. Just listen to that long wall of text that you really need to read or save it for later, with the voice you want. What is Koro about: TEXT TO SPEECH: - Unlimited speech synthesis: turn text of any length into spoken language, whenever you need. Simulate interesting podcasts or relaxing audiobook. - Mix and match voices: choose from built-in voices or blend them together to create your own unique sound. Make it sound just right for you. - Text import: drop in text files or PDFs and Koro will read them out loud. Great for articles, documents, or anything you want to listen to. - Share your audio: save speeches as audio files and share them anywhere. Listen back anytime, even without the app. - Advanced Customization: if some words don’t sound right, add their pronunciation at phoneme level for a perfect speech. TRANSCRIPTION (English): - Live transcription with Whisper. - Extract speech from video and audio files. SUMMARIZATION: - Summarize text with a local language model. - Long text summarization and rewriting. Privacy first: Everything happens right on your device. No cloud services, no data usage, no restrictions. Since everything works offline, your text never leaves your phone. Complete privacy. Performance: The speed and general performances of Koro change depending on your device model. Supported languages: English (American and British) and Italian. Transcription is supported in English. For questions: info@latentlake.com
Comments
Can you use the voices outside the app?
Can the voices be used as VoiceOver or system voices?
Apple system voices
Hello, as far as I know, Apple still doesn’t allow third-party TTS to be used as the system TTS for VoiceOver. When it comes to using the voices outside the app, the only option is to export the audio file generated within the app.
nah, you can get 3rd party voices.
They do though. there's an api and everything I think. espeak is a great example, I have personal experience given I use it as my daily driver.
Espeak
I’m not a developer myself, but I already thought about eSpeak when this question came up. It does seem like it’s the only third-party voice that actually made its way to the iPhone as a system voice, so there must be a particular reason for that. Plus, the voices aren’t AI or natural sounding, they’re still the old robotic style.
From what I understand, Apple doesn’t let third-party voices hook directly into VoiceOver the way Android does. They keep everything closed off, so you can’t just install something like a cappella TTS and set it as your system voice. eSpeak is more of a special case—it’s open source, really lightweight, and easy to compile across platforms, so developers managed to make it run inside iOS. It doesn’t need licensing or fancy processing, which probably made it simpler to get through Apple’s restrictions.
Other companies don’t bother because Apple hasn’t given a proper framework for outside voices to work as system TTS. Apple prefers to keep full control of the voices we get on iOS, like Siri voices or their downloadable premium v vocalizer voices. That’s why eSpeak slipped in as the odd exception, while everything else stays locked out.
Tts reader
And the app I’m recommending here isn’t meant to be an alternative to VoiceOver. It’s more of an alternative to TTS readers like 11 Reader or Speechify, since its purpose is reading text, not functioning as a screen reader.
Please admit you're wrong when you are in fact wrong.
cerprog or however you spell their name does... Nothing requires licensing or special processing, if you have a lisence to use them in an app... unless explisitly stated you can use them as system voices, assuming you go through that effort. Apple allowes 3rd party voices, it has since Ios16, the's a framework and everything. No alternatives to voiceoover exist because of apple's ristrictions, but there's no reason the developer can't make them usable by the system, please don't rely on chatgpt to fill out holes in your arguement unless you know what your talking about, it reflects poorly on you if it makes mistakes, which it just did, several of them in fact.
I agree
If you install another text to speech program that does not replace the screen reader. This implementation has worked since iOS 16 despite developers not hopping onto the idea, not makeing there apps for ios or mack to be used as voices for VoiceOver. Despite the fact that not really any developers, rely on any of this, due to the fact that the devs would rather make speach applications for windows and android. What you're saying is completely wrong, and I advise that you do your research first before you come out and make such false statements.. Even if you did use ChatGPT, it should have some form of awareness about this, as ChatGPT's last update was well after September 2022, which was when these features were put into the public eye, unless you beater tested the software beforehand, something which I did for both iOS and macOS. In fact, let me ask ChatGPT right now.. Interestingly, ChatGPT isn't as up-to-date as I thought, because you need to ask it to search the web to find it. It should be somewhat up to date, past 2022 But maybe the update still isn't enough? Would be absolutely outlandish if that were the case.