Listening: Text to Speech

Preloaded with books and articles I am not interested in. Wasted bandwidth downloading these instead of downloading my docs. When I tried to delete them it gave error messages. Also, when I changed the preferred voice, it didn’t change for docs already started.

I like that you can select voices and there are often misreadings but you can still understand. However I don’t know how the can be translated into t he ?

It was very good at the beginning so I decided to pay the premium. Now it misses whole paragraphs and also reads in text citations. This is very sad. I liked this app quite a lot at the beginning and now it’s a waste of money

First impressions without even using the app, as you signup it suggests to give them a review immediately!!! How can you provide feedback for something you haven’t even used yet? The other major disappointment is AFTER YOU AGREE TO DO THE 2 WEEK TRIAL, APP TAKES YOU TO A LOGIN PAGE, NOT STRAIGHT TO THE USE OF THE APP. Then you have muck around and try to remember what passwords you used etc, DEVELOPERS OF THE APP WANTS EVERYTHING THEY CAN GET WITHOUT THE USER EVEN ACCESSING THE APP YET!!!!!

This app has been working really great as I love habit stacking and getting my studies in while walking!! :) However, it is still quite riddled with bugs!! More recently (25/02/2024), I’ve uploaded a larger pdf document and the voice over doesn’t match the script that’s being highlighted!! Meaning, the narration is many sentences and even paragraphs ahead of the highlighted section, which is unfortunate because the reading + listening combo is super powerful!! It also struggles with analysing and pronouncing certain words which has been described in over reviews. This is where it will pronounce the individual letters in a word one at a time rather than the word itself - for example: “only” read as “o”, “n”, “l”, “y”, which disturbs the flow quite a lot!! Overall this app is awesome and I hope the developers continue to bug fix and address these problems!! 🙏🏼🙏🏼

I’m so impressed with how easy this is - the ability to upload a pdf from my desktop, and then have a realistic voice read something aloud on my phone is unreal (without having to send or laboriously sync). The available voices are all great and you can make notes! This has changed my working life for sure!

It kept missing words and breaking words into parts

This is an interesting idea. The speed and potentials are great and it could provide great help to academics. However, this is not a final product and it seems to have been rushed into the market. So when it demands pay, it is in effect asking us, the users, to fund the product development. This would have been somewhat acceptable if the product had the bare minimums required for an academic audio app, namely, 1- cross platform or at least cross device sync (the former is non existent and I think the same goes for the latter) 2- export capabilities that make sense for academics (lacking). At the moment it seems out notes marked as notes, without any reference to context. You can see the context on the app in terms of the name of the reference and the paragraph. This is already poor for academic work and adds to rather than reducing the workflow for academic note taking. But upon export, even that already poor contextual info (reference to text location) is lost. 3- reading is glitchy. In many instances it misreads simple words and expressions, let alone more complex, less familiar terms etc. With these shortcomings, the app, in my opinion, is underdeveloped even as a prototype and therefore financialising it is premature.

Nice idea, but not usable. Uploaded a preprint PDF to this. It took overnight to process it and when it was ready, the text was often corrupted. It seemed to have difficulty distinguishing letters (often in the middle of words) from numbers, which meant the audio was often impossible to follow.

I did a free trial and I think it’s just not quite there. It makes a lot of mistakes which makes it almost impossible to understand and follow properly. For example I tried one pdf and the spacing for the word of was too big for it and it read all of the work O. F instead of of. That interrupted the flow for me. Also if the pdf spacing was smaller it mashed up words so you would have like three words read as one. You end up focusing on those mistakes and then having to follow the text on screen to understand which doesn’t help at all because it defeats the purpose and you can’t concentrate on the content.