Speech Central text to speech app for Mac, feedback required

By Labsii, 8 June, 2017

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

I am a developer of the app Speech Central, which is available for all Apple's devices (Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV).

On Mac this is a comprehensive text to speech app that can take all sort of inputs - web (but not just web articles but also web pages with headlines that are shown in an interactive way so that you can add interesting articles right from those reading pages), documents (pdf, docx, pptx, html, eml, txt, OpenOffice), e-books (epub, fb2) and both speak aloud those forms or saving them into the .m4a format. Also the app supports annotation of those texts like bookmarking the paragraphs or marking whole the texts as favorite for easier retrieval using the filters and search.

I would appreciate if someone could take a look into the app (I can provide several users with a free code to get the app) and provide his honest opinion regarding how helpful this app is regarding the accessibility here https://www.applevis.com/node/add/mac-app-directory . I am also committed to improve the app according to the feedback from those users.

You can take a more detailed look on the app at the Mac App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/speech-central-text-to-speech-suite/id1223093645?mt=12

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Comments

By Erion on Monday, June 5, 2017 - 11:26

Hello,
I am a blind Mac/iOS developer from Hungary.
Thank you very much for taking the time to make this application more accessible for us! I would be happy to provide useful information to be able to use this application via VoiceOver.

As a sidenote, I've been looking for an application which is able to save text in an audio file and finally decided to write one, only to see your forum post a few hours later.

I forgot to mention that you can use robjoy88@gmail.com, should you wish to send a free code.
I will be sure to add Speech Central to the App directory, if someone hasn't done it already, once the improvements are present in the AppStore version.
Once again, thank you very much for making the application more accessible.

By techluver on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 - 11:26

I would love to test and give feedback. Please send a code to:
harrytu3@gmail.com
thanks!

By Chris on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 - 11:26

I'd love to test the app and provide my feedback. You can send me an email at blindgamer87atyahoo.com replace the word at with the symbol.

By Labsii on Wednesday, July 5, 2017 - 11:26

I'll be sending coupons to all people that have applied till now either via email or here. Some of them have already received the coupons and provided a useful feedback and the new version of the app is just submitted to the Store. I would like to express my gratitude to them and to this great community.

However, due to limited number of the coupons that I can create I won't be able issue new ones after this comment in this thread. The feedback is still welcome and I'll try to implement everything that I can - I am fully committed to implement every advice that doesn't require a large scale development and even for those that do I am willing to consider implementing them in the future.

By Mlth on Saturday, August 5, 2017 - 11:26

Hi
I just got the app today, and it is great! I have some suggestions:
Is it possible to make it speak even faster? The fastest speed is still fairly slow compared to what Alex is normally capable of, but I'm not sure if it's an OS X limitation, or you are able to make it go faster. If you are, that'd be great!
Also, I was wondering if you could add a search function, so one can do a text search through, say, an e-book?

Malthe

By Labsii on Saturday, August 5, 2017 - 11:26

Hi Malthe,

thanks for your suggestions!

Regarding the speed, there is the possibility to set it higher speed but I felt like that the voice has too much of the distortions to be useful. However it could be that I haven't tried with Alex but some other voice, I'll check that again.

Considering the find function, it would be possible, but in the first iteration probably you would be only able to search inside one chapter. Possibly it could ask to stop the reproduction and search all chapters if nothing is found. As said that is somewhat more complicated but surely not impossible.