Speechify Text to Speech Audio

I took part in the 3 day free trail- cancelled before the 3 days were up and had a confirmation email to say so and STILL HAD £134.99 TAKEN OUT OF NY ACCOUNT!! Absolutely disgraceful. This is a lot of money meaning that I am now going to struggle financially because this money has wrongly been stolen from me. I am disgusted.

I am studying on a degree course and initially found Speechify invaluable. I paid the £130, despite reservations, because it was the best reader that I’d come across. Since the Christmas break, it has failed on around 75% of the texts I’ve put into it. It splits off random first letters of words and pronounces them in such a way that it’s impossible to follow along. The input text seems fine, it’s clear enough, no different to before, when it actually seemed to handle poorly scanned text as well. Now it’s next to useless to me, as though the service I was receiving has somehow been removed. Think carefully before you subscribe would be my advice.

I used the free trial because I only needed the app for one thing and that was it. I ask to be notified when the trial had ended and they failed to do so and I was subsequently charged the extortionate amount of £134.99 because of their negligence to notify me. I contacted Apple and they won’t refund me and because the subscription is through Apple, this app can’t refund me even though it’s their fault. £134.99 is a hell of a lot of money for me especially when spending it on an app that I will never use again, I might as well have burnt that money. This app is not worth that much. Find somewhere cheaper or even better that doesn’t charge you for using an aid due to disabilities. I’m broke this month and will probably be for the next because of this app.

Will slow walk you through a tedious and unnecessary set up process and then offer you a 48 hour free trial and then it’s a pre activated £135 subscription

I wanted to try this app for a work project, as it was a 3 days trial offered with a reminder before charge. Well it was no reminder just a whole year change, not even offering a monthly subscription. I found this utter nonsense. Reached out to the app customer service, they said sorry but Apple has to approve the refund. Of course Apple came back with a NO. That’s it, not even a solution. I feel this is set up on purpose so they can charge you for £134 no matter if you wish to go ahead with a year subscription or not. The reminder is a lie, there is no email or app notification at all what I was relayed on. Also, shame on Apple! Ignoring customers right and just refusing help with a 3 word sentence. I’m utterly disappointed. The app is ok but doesn’t worth £134! :(

Takes ages to set up, and only then do they tell you it’s going to be £135 per annum 😅 First epub I pointed it at, the app spends 5 minutes scanning only to fail. No thanks

This app hides the fact that it’s paid only behind a 10minute fake tutorial, filled with meaningless loading bars and questionnaires for no reason

I saw an advert for Speechify on instagram and the promotional video showed a lady take a picture of a book cover then start listening to the book. It doesn’t work like that at all you would have to tediously take a picture of every page to be able to listen to the book. 1. This is a laborious task 2. It would clog up my phones memory 3. The video is very misleading and should be made clearer

Not affordable

Speechify used to have some of the best voices for reading docs and in terms of how the app integrates with chrome and various other bits and bobs, that’s still great, but they haven’t kept up with the potential of AI voices! Their latest voices sound clunky in comparison to ElevenLabs which is free and now has much better (ie expressive/human sounding/natural voices). I don’t think Speechify have introduced a new voice for over a year now - they seem to be resting on their laurels. They still advertising their updates as rarara, we have Gwyneth Paltrow and Snoop Dogg! As if anybody would want to have an audiobook or a document read read by Gwyneth Paltrow or Snoop Dogg. FFS, Speechify!!! Very disappointing. I renewed my subscription this year, but I won’t renew again.