Voice Dream iOS text to speech
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I have to say that I am really pleased with the application called Voice Dream. I got this application because I wanted to have something to listen to when I’d run out of downloaded podcasts. VoiceDream is a useful tool to have when I am out of podcasts in my podcast listing application Overcast. What I do is to load up some PDF documents or I can load up a webpage and have a really nice voice talking to me. I can bring documents in from Dropbox and one or two other places as well. I am still testing out all the different ways I can use this application and I love what I see and hear so far. I also got this application so that I could have it read my writing to me so that I could listen for where I have made mistakes and I can perhaps change things.
The application comes with some default voices which are okay and I bought one for two €2.99 to see if it was any better. In the trial in the app it sounded a little bit better. I bought another voice for €4.99 which is even better again.
[Tweet “Voice Dream is a great little app for text to speech”]
There are a few different voices you can choose from based on different places in the world. So you can use an American voice or British English voice or Australian voice even. I have chosen a voice which goes by the name of Amy and is sounds very good indeed. I also bought a male voice called Hugh. I also like the voice called Rachel which sounds a little more soothing.
Tried using Voice Dream reading a longer piece of text, a public document domain book as I want to be able to listen to stories while I am working. It is much better than listening to music because I can’t plug any headphones in and music is better in stereo.
It did take me a little while to work out how to get the text from the webpage into the document for it to start reading. I had to choose a button to do some sort of smart save. Then the app was able to do a good job of bringing in just the part I wanted to listen to from the webpage. It brought in just the main body of text and didn’t bring in the extra bits you find around the edges in the sidebars et cetera.
There is an editor so I can put my own words into the application. I can also bring in words through iTunes. I see there is an option to bring in books from the Guttenberg project. These are full-length books which are in the public domain.
So can I recommend Voice Dream to use for generating voice from text? Absolutely, it is well worth getting the free version to try out. It only reads a short piece and stops in the free version. The standard voices are useable but sound a little robotic compared to the extras available as in-app purchases.
