Listening: Text to Speech

This could be such a good app but leaves me frustrated more days than not. A 3 page pdf upload taking 3 minutes and 3 attempts, glitches and bugs are common until you finally get your reading document. Please make an effort to fix this.

Would buy the subscription again, but please add more voices in German

I was automatically subscribed to an annual subscription without confirmation. Before having the chance to test the app, they try to upsell you to a 5 year plan! Skipping that and finally installing the app, I was shocked by the bad interaction design: 1. Uploading a file is confusing, as the banner with the icon looks like a button. It is not. You have to scroll half a page down to finally click “Select a file” 2. Converting of a 10 page pdf took 5 minutes. It is embarrassingly slow. 3. Whole paragraphs are being skipped over (this occurred in various pdfs) 4. Number that are not single digit sound really glitched out 5. Subscription panel highlights words blue, suggesting a hyperlink which was not the case. 6. Unsubscribing via the broken web app (on phone) was a pain

It is impossible to change the reading languages once it uploaded the text. Especially when using links it always only reads it in English, rendering all uploads in other languages utterly useless! Why can the language be changed? That seems to be such an easy fix to do!!! Really disappointing. I hope you fix this as quick as possible, this must be a priority!!!!

I really like the idea of this app, and it would be very convenient if the reading was more reliable. Unfortunately, using the PDF I tested it with (Nature paper) the pronounciation had many errors, (- interpreted as pause, microbial names mispronounced, and figure legends inserted at random places). If this were a free app I might keep using it, but for me the performance doesn’t (yet) justify paying for it.

In words containing “ff” and “fi” like “different” or “beneficial”, they get replaced with asian symbols and are read as those. I cannot understand why I would pay for this. Every third sentence is screwed up…

I was very excited by the idea, but it doesn’t work well in practice. The AI voices don’t recognise most foreign words and characters in English texts (eg. she pronounced “¥” as “Y equals…” 😅), and the intonation is very artificial. I get that it’s an AI, but I had hoped for something better than my Mac’s text-to-speech. This would all be okay, but on top, the app makes it quite difficult to cancel a free trial (actually I’m pretty sure you can’t even do that on the app itself, you have to go to the app store), which is a bit shady. In any case, this could be a fantastic tool in the future! As for now, I can’t recommend it.

I am a vivid user of PDF documents and I have to read lot’s of paper, books/ ebooks, professionally and also privately(constant studies). I am not buying to many books as I tried to have them with me, so mostly hope to have pdf or such, to have it on the iPad, phone, Supernote. As I do have to drive and travel a lot, reading is not the most suitable way, hearing is the better option. And guess what, that’s probably my new solution. Let’s see…

The idea of the app is great and having papers read out loud works just fine. However, some changes might improve the user experience of the app, such as adding a “listened to” so that one knows which files still need to be listened to, improving the tag function or adding the function to add files/libraries to be able to sort the content better.

I tested it with one nature paper. It read less than half of the abstract, but the entire DOI. Also parts of the main text are left out. Footnotes are read as “to the power of…”. Nice idea but in the current form not usable. Would be happy to pay if it would work as promised, but they shot themselves in the foot by launching a beta version and requiring a paid subscription.