Voice dream reader queries.

Hello Maruti,

I'll try my best to answer your questions.

<ol><li>I would say that all of the voices are quite good for reading books. They are very natural and expressive. It is possible to sample all of the voices before choosing one. To sample voices, go into Settings and then Manage my Voices, and then you'll be able to see all of the available voices. Note that many are not free; to see these, tap on the Store button in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.</li>
<li>There isn't a convenient way to do this from inside Voice Dream Reader. When you are reading a book using text-to-speech, tap in the middle of the screen where the text window is located. Then use the VoiceOver rotor to find the word you want to know the meaning of. Switch the rotor to characters and see how the word is spelled. Then you could either type the word into a dictionary app or website or ask Siri for the meaning of the word.</li>
<li>This is also quite difficult. Some blindness agencies make digital versions of newspapers available. If you are a member of such an agency, you may be able to open the newspaper in Voice Dream Reader. If not, it could be quite time-consuming to load each article you want to read into the app.</li>
<li>Yes. You can increase the speed of text content and audio content. To do it, find the Audio Settings button, and flick up to increase the speed or flick down to decrease the speed. You do not need to double-tap on the button to do this.</li></ol>

If you are using VoiceOver, it is not possible to activate full screen mode.

Voices are very subjective because everyone has their own preferred voice. I only speak English, and my preferred voice is alex. Alex is a voice that is also available for VoiceOver, thus it is free but does take up almost a gigabyte of space.

Voice Dream Reader doesn't have a dictionary where you can look up the definition of a word. It has a feature called a pronunciation dictionary which allows you to modify how the text-to-speech voice pronounces a word if it does not pronounce it correctly.

At one time, there was a service in the app where you could use Google Translate to translate documents. This feature was removed a while ago.

To download Bookshare books, go to Settings and then Content Sources, and enable Bookshare. Then tap on the More Info button where you will be able to add your account details. Then, from the main screen of the app, tap on the Add button, then the More button, and turn on Bookshare. Once you've done that, when you tap on the Add button, Bookshare will be one of the available content sources. Tap on it to start downloading books.

I found some more information on your question about reading news articles in Voice Dream Reader. If you are using Safari and have found an article that you want to import into Voice Dream Reader, tap on the Share button and then choose Voice Dream. After that, choose one of the buttons from towards the bottom of the screen that allow you to choose how much of the article you wish to import. After that, choose one of the buttons at the bottom of the screen to either open the article in Voice Dream Reader or save it into your library.

Another method to read news articles in Voice Dream is to use either Instapaper or Pocket. When you use either of these services, you add an article to the service, and then can read it in Voice Dream Reader after selecting it in the list of content sources (see my instructions above about how to do that--it is the same as for Bookshare). There is comprehensive information in the Voice Dream Reader user manual about how to use Instapaper and Pocket with Voice Dream Reader.