Invitation to the Voice Dream App Stars Drop Event

Support the move but I doubt this will have a significant impact to push them to reconsider their decision. They would already have done that upon the first upsurge of discontent when they switched to a subscription-based model had they wanted to. By the way, those remaining silent back then may not have as much to say as we do now, as it is likely that only if or when their own interests matter do they choose to speak up.

A developers subscription to Apple is $200 per year. I don't use the app, but there may be server costs involved, or even if not, none of us knows what else has to be covered. The problem with lifetime one time purchases is a certain amount of people will buy it, and then sales drop off. What happens then? No income for the developers. do what you want to do, but there's plenty of other apps you can use I'm sure.

Patrick this sounds like a dishonest comment. First the developer license is 100$/year. They sell their app for 80$/year. So if they sell just to two new users they can afford to pay it. Are you in doubt that they can sell two licenses in a whole year or you are after some agenda?

I have given my 1-star review and that is the first 1-star review I give in years. Is there anything else that can be done? Is writing directly to Apple to complain gonna make a difference?

I don't think that this is the time to write to Apple. Until they actually disable features for users there is nothing that Apple can do as from their point nothing is happening.

However after that happens it makes sense to ask Apple accessibility for the official answer if they are sponsors of this, as Apple currently puts Editor's choice and Best accessibility apps titles on Voice Dream. I don't think that Apple would like to be associated with this that way, but we'll see. In my opinion it doesn't make sense to act on that before May 1st as at the moment everything is working properly.

Applause are going to speak to Jonathan Mosan in the next day or so. It makes sense to see what they say before making a decision on whether or not they are a lost cause and deserve to be consigned to the history books. I already know what I’ll be recommending to the people I know who rely on Voicedream. It’s going to be a massive inconvenience for them but Speech Central and Book Player are very good apps in their own right and cover all of the functionality needed between them. Jonathan is definitely the right person for the job as he will hear them out and hopefully push just a little further than he usually does given the stakes and how very obviously Applause are in the wrong here. They have to fight for their survival over the next few days. We’ll be watching and judging whether they get another chance or whether the full scale rejection of this practice has to be complete in order to show we won’t stand for this from anyone else. If Applause losing their investment money serves the purpose of showing blind people won’t be lied to then it will be an unfortunate loss but we’ll move on and at least some good will have come from it. If Applause want to make a viable business with fair treatment of customers and an incentive to attract new ones, its up to them to come to the table with an apology, reassurance that they won’t remove functionality from customers who have already paid and a plan to add features they can charge for to attract new customers and grow their business. They can’t just grow their business by denying access to things people have already bought.

I think what the developers of Voice Dream are doing, is highly immoral if not illegal. When I bought it, there was no mention of the possibility of at some stage having to pay again to continue using it. If you buy something like Jaws, you know upfront that there will be updates for which you would have to pay, but that is fine, you know about it when you buy Jaws and, besides, it is your choice whether or when to update. When I bought Voice Dream, there was no mention of future payments. I believed I owned it to use it for life. Now I am asked to pay for it again! And quite a hefty subscription on top of it. I will not. I hope they will be hit hard by user resistance. I believe every blind user here in South Africa will dump the app. This is a despicable and dishonest company and people should avoid them like the plague.

If you want the new stuff then you pay. If you don’t, you just carry on using what you bought and own.

How can you charge for something people bought years back? It is ridiculous to say the least.

First this shouldn't be celebrated! Second lets hear what the devs say to Jonathan Mosen. It should be interesting.

Think we already have a pretty substantial thread on this topic so not going to repeat myself here.

But just to say, I've added my rating and review.

I added my rating and review as well. Interesting on jonathan's interview though, although if they made this move already... I highly doubt they'll reconsider. That, and not to mention the obvious; they have, by pulling this stunt; they broke their user's trust. And that, is something that is really, really diffucult to regain back. I mean even if they decide to go back and honor previous subscriptions, the damage has been done, in my opinion. Even if they backpedal and honor existing users who bought the app as a one time thing, its highly likely a lot of users will not go back to it, as i've said, the dammage is done.

I doubt they will reconsider but they may do something like a monthly option, or just an subscription for iPhone users. There is a lot they could do to gain back the support of the community.

Do you want bugs to be fixed? It isn't sustainable for them to never charge. Even Winston said he would have to charge a subscription before he sold it. so You would be in the same spot.

eventually I think we all would've been effected. even if Winston were running the show.

Yes, eventually it would have ran out, however users would still have to keep paying to use the app.

That should be up to the customer to decide. If they’re happy with the feature set they already bought then removing that from them is an act of theft. It’s up to applause to develop a feature set and product that people are willing to pay for. Not remove what they already bought. At some point iOS might change and perhaps Applause don’t want to put development into the old app that people own, maybe its a 10 minute fix and maybe it takes significant development. They can then choose whether or not to update the app so it works with whatever changes are made to iOS. Likely even if it was an easy fix, they’d be incentivised not to update but that would be a natural process. Now customers could choose to subscribe or not. Steeling what someone owns and only allowing them to use it again if they pay isn’t how it’s done.

Exactly. Besides, don't know why applause didn't realize exsisting customers, they'd still get money from them from the mac's side of the app? But yeah, what they did here is all sorts of wrong, and as I've said, rapist mentality that so many companies today seem to choose, which is all sorts of messed up.

They bought an asset for money and their job is to turn the money they spent into more money. They have value in the software they bought and potential value in the customers who were using that software. Their job was to turn that potential value into real money but they fluffed it so hard. They were on the right track last year when they said nothing would change for customers who already bought their software but for new ones there would be a subscription. Personally I feel like they over reached with what they were asking but thats just opinion, anyway. If they realised they either wanted or needed more money then the right move would have been to split the old version off and charge customers for the new version. Stop development on the old. Maybe put good will maintenance updates out if they choose but concentrate most of their efforts in showing the old crowd what they were missing with the incredible new features they were developing. Then nobody could have argued which is where they were sitting before they decided to Elon their product. Now they have a new job which is to convince their customers they aren’t a bunch of lying douchebags and that they value their customers and want to keep them. Once they’ve achieved that goal its time to reset and go back to the original plan.

Sorry? An apple dev account is only $100 a year, not $200. Not sure where, or why you are spreading such misinformation and nonsense! Do your research! My take on this is the following, I understand from a dev point of view you gotta keep the lights on but this ain't the way this company or, any company should go about it. I will not, and will never be supporting to pay a subscription price for such an app as this, which does what? is a book reader! They movin' funny and ain't liking this at all. It's so wrong! Maybe if there were server costs involved, perhaps I'd say $50 is reasonable but as far as I know, this app ain't server based at all from what I gather. What's more, snot good business. They promise existing users will not be affected by their so called subscription model and yet they go back on their word forcing everyone to pay? Na, I don't think so! I honestly wouldn't mind if the price was like 20 or 30 bucks a year, more affordable, but this company just wants your money. It's why they jacking up the prices to what? $80? I know there's a 20 percent discount but still, too much! Yall are gettin' a one star and a blatantly honest review! Remember, if we all give this app a one star rating, things can change. Seen it myself. Will it though? I doubt it but yall may never know. All we can do is well, do our part.

Thing is, there are people, I for one, that when something like this happens, they go back on their word and causes one to lose their trust... That's it. They can backpedal all they want, but there is a 90% chance I'll never use their app, service, whatever they're celling, ever again. That's just my thoughts, because... because as the saying goes, he who betrays someone once, will betray twice. And in most cases, this is exactly what happens, big corporation does something, gets caught in the act, makes a halfassed apology, waits for the dust to settle, and then they start doing the same exact thing all over again. For me, I give a lot of slack, but once trust is broken? Good luck getting it back, if you ever do At least this is how I am with large corporations. With people i'm more leniant by a lot; but with people in large corporations that should, honestly, know better? Yeah no.

I wonder if there is some definition in the contract you signed when purchasing that defines 'lifetime', or elsewhere. Who's lifetime? Yours? Theirs? The life time of the app? The lifetime of the app without significant change, IE v1 before becoming v2?

It's certainly a really bad move for a pretty trash app that I really can't see the benefit in.

Sorry you all have this. It's bad form though, unfortunately, I doubt it is unlawful. The right thing and the legal thing don't always overlap.

I brought this app outright and tried it for a few weeks. I didn't find it very useful as if I'm reading a book, a PDF or a web page, I use the Alex voice. The TTS voices provided were early 2000s quality at best and not very expressive.

Am I missing something with this app? Why did people rave about it?

What I'd love to see is someone make an app that can use AI modelling to read something back in a voice that sounds like it's from this decade and not some Nuance garbage from the mid-2000s.

Apps should not move to paid subscription if you've bought the app outright.

I found the voices to be very useful, myself. My hearing problem means that me and Alex don't really see eye to eye, but the Acapella voices really helped. Now, this is one very agitated VoiceDream customer who bought the app, plus several voices to go with it. If they need to make back the money they invested in the product, they should have come up with a way that doesn't alienate their current user base. Perhaps they came to the conclusion that not many Mac users bother with VoiceDream; that's where I use Speech Central, for example, on my Mac. But throwing existing customers under the bus like that is just plain wrong.

there will be a monthly option for $5.99 a month.

I have a subscription to Office for the same price. Plus an Audible subscription, an iCloud subscription and a Google Drive subscription. For those who can afford the subscription, this is good news. For me, this is still the end of the road.

The most important thing is that they row back on stealing peoples property that they paid for. After that they can do whatever they want with their pricing and we can decide whether we want to pay. i’m sure they are monitoring what is going on on this site so they obviously know what is at stake and what is required to at least undo the damage they have caused.

This is disgusting. If I pay for an app I do not expect to pay for it again.

If their business is losing money or is going to go down that's not on any of you as customers at all, it's completely on them.

Give all the people back their money and see how much they trust you after this.

Personally, I'd never buy an app from them again.

I read that on the other thread it wouldn't affect those who have paid for the app, this was on the first page, so I assume that's changed then?

I've also read about it going up to $80 a year after some time? This is disgusting and I wil be writing to these people about this even though I don't use the app.

Correct. Now even if you previously owned the app, your forced to subscribe, even if you had previously bought the app as a one time charge. I ditched the app a long time ago when it went subscription based before this mess, but still. As a prier customer of the app? This is disgusting, and I left a review telling as such.

We understand that the recent pricing changes for the Voice Dream app have generated strong feelings among our community members. However, we must maintain a respectful and family-friendly environment on the AppleVis forum.

We have removed a couple of comments from this thread due to the use of vulgar and profane language, which is a violation of our posting guidelines. While we recognize the emotions surrounding this issue, we kindly ask that all members refrain from using vulgarity, profanity, or any other inappropriate language in their comments.

We encourage open and constructive discussions but firmly believe in upholding a certain level of decorum and respect. Let's continue to engage in a civil manner and keep our conversations productive and focused on the topic at hand.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

You can subscribe to livingly blindfully plus for just 60 american cents and get access today or wait 3 days. I strongly encourage you to listen to it. I do think the Voicedream team does care and value our feedback.

We'll have to wait and see, saying things is easy, but atually following that with actions... is not. More often than not people say x or y but when it comes to actions, its a complete 180 compared to their words so... Only time and actions, will tell. The problem is, you shouldn't have to mess up like this and then backtrack because you got caught messing up, that's never a good look for anyone, tbh, but we'll see I suppose, although honestly speech central meets my needs, so its unlikely I'll ever go back to vdr, but hopefully they change.

COuld someone summarize their remarks, or link to a free recording of the episode?

The free version will be out in a few days. Honestly I didn’t hear anything that sounded promising, just a lot of rephrasing stuff that’s already been said and speaking from a place of financial privilege on the part of the blind folks who were speaking.

Edit: for fun I was checking out the reviews chronologically and holy cow do not give this company money! So many reviews from November 2023 onward are people getting charged for a full subscription when they were just attemting to do the free trial and when they try to cancel there's no way to do so. There's also a lot of reviews saying the customer support email is defunct and it looks like I wasn't imagining how much trouble the app has been since the aquisition. And for a nice little cherry on top, they seem to be just plain lying about what the app is and does in the description (maybe I'm wrong here but I sure haven't seen any AI voices). If the folks at Applause Group want to correct any of these thoughts with a professional blog update I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd like to read that, but given their track record, digging for information and giving it a best guess is probably all we can expect.

I haven’t heard anyone say Applause would let the old version that everyone has paid for age out naturally. If they had promised to go back to their position from 11 months ago before they planned on steeling everyone’s property then it would have been a different story. Maybe we could have seen how development went and weighed the value of the subscription proposition but without that good faith gesture, I’m out and will be recommending to 3 other people the alternatives. They had a chance and as far as I can tell, they blew it No more chances after that. It looks like they’re rotten to the core. Someone let me know if I’m reading this wrong? If they promised a rollback, we need to know. Personally I don’t use this app anywhere near enough to get upset about its loss but I tend to get more upset about things that affect others more than for myself. This will seriously upset a couple of people I know who bought this app years ago. Are comfortable with its layout and only use it for reading books because they need stimulation and don’t work. They can’t afford it, they already bought it and Applause are steeling their property before it would have naturally died on its own. Unacceptable.

Check out the podcast with Jonathan Mosen. Please do so with an open mind.
My thoughts have changed a little:
1 It costs to keep an app going.
2 They made promises in the recent blog post.
3 They know they have zero room for error.
4 there are actually more expensive apps that do less. So pricing wise it is fair.
5 The monthly option gives you an option to check it out and see if they do what they say.
I would recommend that if you can't afford the yearly option. Give them until the end of the year. To remind people the monthly option is $5.99 You will be able to pay in the app store so you will have the ability to easily cancel.

I'll be deleting this app. Just too many subscription, and I already bought this, and voices to go with it, hands down. If it was possible at this oint I'd ask for a refund, but that horse has long ago left the barn door swinging. I'll not repeat what others have said; suffice it to say that the loss of VoiceDream is major, for me at least. I can't afford to cancel any of my subscriptions, many of which cost less than this, just so I can continue to use this.

I listened to the podcast and it sounded like a lot of repeating what they've said before, no substance and no concrete examples. If they post an actual cost breakdown of what that money is for I'd be less skeptical, but it's pretty telling that they never name their supposedly more costly competitors (which I have yet to see) and their pricing is just what a Bookshare subscription costs but with none of the benefits.

I also took a look at the reviews on the app going back to October and do not give them your money. People who were trying to use the free trial got trapped in the over priced subscription with no way to cancel and no response from Applause Group when they wanted their money back. The current app description itself is a lie, claiming there are AI voices when we all know there haven't been any new voices let alone AI ones since the app was bought.

I can't even find information about this company when I search. The more I look into them, the skeevier they get. I'm willing to bet they have a graveyard of apps they've killed off behind them.

For the fairness let's say that they have made one major step forward. In the new version they offer you the previously quoted discount with the App Store purchase, so it is a real discount as this time they get less than what they did before and you keep the same Apple's protection for the payment refunding.

Unfortunately there are much more lies.

Let's go with the first one - major maintenance cost. Let's quote the obvious - IVONA voices have been discontinued 7 years ago. As far as I can tell they work perfectly. So, how could it be that those voices work for 7 years with 0 hours on the maintenance and Voice Dream needs some amazing amount of work? Not to say that for many years Winston was obviously working most of the time on other projects like Voice Dream for Android and Mac, or Scanner. How could it be that all those years he didn't have other developer and he spent just few hours on the iOS version and it still worked well?

Let's go with the second one - more expensive apps. There are no more expensive apps, every other app by itself is probably 100x less expensive in the long run than Voice Dream. There are more expensive services but that's completely another dimension that Voice Dream doesn't offer and that just reflects real high cost of running those.

Let's take for example NaturalReader that offers Microsoft voices (the same one available in Speech Central). They sell their service for $110/year. However if you use all available characters they earn 0$ as they have to pay 110$ to Microsoft and for Apple's fees. They only earn the money if some user doesn't reach the limit in some month which isn't particularly big (one book will do it).

It is hard to compare this to Voice Dream in any way. They only offer voices from the companies that don't exist anymore and most of those products don't exist anymore either. Those haven't been updated in 10 years and can be compared only to Apple's current Premium voices in their level of technology.

So it is hard to say whether they are paying anything for them. The last information I had was that Acapela was charging I think 3$ per lifetime iOS license for a single user. It doesn't sound that this costs a lot of money. And even if it did, what exactly it has with old users? Some of them have bought Acapela voices and already paid for a lifetime license for them too. So Voice Dream has no cost for them. For those users that don't use Acapela, Voice Dream again has not cost.

So what are $60 or $80/year spent for? Mostly for ads. It is no secret that Applause Group buys ads for Voice Dream and some industry standard is that you need to pay $50 in ads to acquire the new user in this price range. I cannot say exact amount, but they certainly spend 5 figured number of dollars on ads almost every month (sometimes they had short pauses in running those ads, one of them is now).

That is what Speechify does too, but they have 80 million dollars of investor's money to spend for that and high service cost, so it is much harder to complain on them.

This is a developer that is trying to do one thing attract others to there app. plain and simple. so take what they say with a heavy pinch of salt.

Hi Dennis,

And how do we know that you haven't received money from Applause group since you have turned your opinion in 180 degrees in one day for no apparent reason?

If you want to dismiss anything I have said, go ahead. I haven't heard anything from you in that regard.

I shouldn't respond. I have not received any money from the Applause group. I listened to Jonathan Mosen's podcast. People are entitled to change their stance. You helped contribute to that with your rant that helping me was a "waste of your time"

I haven't heard that podcast, but as no one had the same reaction as you did and arguments that you provided sound more like a PR, don't you think it is suspicious?

Again you have mentioned to other people here that maintenance is expensive and that Voice Dream costs twice less than any similar app. I say that it is just a PR that for some reason you distribute, but I give you the chance explain how it is like that, please. Or just confirm that you don't do anything but distribute PR.

Okay this is getting out of hand. Having heard Mozen's podcast myself I can see why some folks might be more willing to change their minds about all this. Accusing someone you don't know of being a paid shill is pretty rude and very pointless. We are all entitled to our opinions and have the right to change our minds if we want to. I personally didn't find anything new in the podcast and a lot that made me more suspicious of the app, but that's just me. Other people have gotten different results from hearing it. Until you've listened to it yourself you need to step back on judging strangers so nastily.

I've not used your app and don't intend to but really? So dominic is a pr because he changed his mind? That really makes no sense at all.

I don't want nor care about both of your apps but your last couple of posts are just childish.

Brad lets be clear I haven't decided that I will pay for it or not. But I would pay for voicedream before I used speech Central after the attitude of the Speech Central dev. He attacks anyone he doesn't agree with. This has happened on other email lists. In fact he said it was "a waste of time to try and help me" Even though I read and followed his instructions. At least you get help from voicedream. You also have a lot of long time users could help.

If it is legitimate for a person that admits not to like me (which is less of a problem by itself) to try to dismiss my claims just because I am the developer, I don’t think that it is illegitimate to try to portray to him what argument ad hominem means. I have never actually claimed that he took the money, the point is exactly that we need to talk in arguments and not in some arbitrary claims.

Well, the arguments have been made. I know six people who have already deleted their Voice Dream copies in favor of other solutions. I paid for the app and many of its voices, and find it extremely irritating that the new devs have both broken their promise and use utterly baseless arguments to justify their decision. As for the podcast, it adds nothing to what we knew, and let's call it opportunity lost, though knowing its producer and its lenient attitude towards companies, I didn't expect more.

I don't use the app and feel like if you keep calling denis a pr person for the other company applevis will get involved.

If voicedream reply i'll let you know what they say but that's it.