[labsii]

After being available for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Apple TV, Speech Central is coming to Mac to be one of the rare apps that is available on all Apple devices!

It is available on the Mac's App Store in the form of the text to speech suite that goes far beyond the basics.

You can add RSS feeds or home pages of the web sites, track new items and listen to the headlines there. And while listening to the headlines you can add their articles for reading interactively. As expected you can also import a large choice of the text documents and e-books. All those items are stored for later retrieving with support for search, filters and annotations (favorites and paragraph bookmarks). You can easily convert them to .m4a audio files and export them for use on various devices.



Get it on the Mac's App Store

If you have any questions or feedback, I am the developer and I would be glad to answer them!

[pkcable]

NICE! Might just have to get that!

[Ledsteplin]

Thank you for sharing your app! Good luck with it! I like the iPhone version!

[labsii]

The app had frequent updates improving usability, adding new features and support for the latest macOS features (like the dark mode in macOS Mojave).

Also on Mojave's App Store there are app priviews that help you get the better insight into the app:

[labsii]

In August 2019 the app has crossed 10,000 licenses sold on all platforms, so I've decided to celebrate this with a big discount. On 2nd September (it has already started now and may be available on 3rd September too in some time zones) the price will be reduced from 7.99$ to 0.99$.

The App Store link to get the app is: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/speech...h/id1223093645

[scruffypig]

What are the benefits of paying for your app for iPhone or iPad, when I can use Apple’s built in accessibility text to speech for free, and I only need to swipe two fingers downward on the screen, and it works with almost any app or browser?

[labsii]

What are the benefits of paying for your app for iPhone or iPad, when I can use Apple’s built in accessibility text to speech for free, and I only need to swipe two fingers downward on the screen, and it works with almost any app or browser?

This is the thread for the macOS, so I am unsure if you ask for the macOS or for the iOS.

If it is about iOS, the app is free so you can try it and check whether it has some benefits for you or not.

It is really hard to make the complete list of benefits as there are too many of them, but I'll point to some of them:

• VoiceOver is not content aware. It will read the user interface elements too and quite a lot of junk of the text, actually in many cases junk information may be majority. If you are on the web site, it will read whole the site navigation, for example.
• VoiceOver won't work in the background with the screen off
• VoiceOver won't interact with audio buttons on the headphones.
• You don't have VoiceOver history, favorites, comments, bookmarks
• VoiceOver can't inteligently use multiple voices to indicate content switch
• VoiceOver can't have playlists
• You can't use VoiceOver hands-free
• You cannot easily navigate the content with VoiceOver (like go to the next sentence or next paragraph, or 30 sec ahead, or to the next title and dozen more things)
• You can't change the speed of VoiceOver on the fly.
• If you want to read all supported e-books, office documents, rss feeds, you would need to install dozen of apps with VoiceOver

Really there is much more, but I hope this is enough info for you to try.

[scruffypig]

This is the thread for the macOS, so I am unsure if you ask for the macOS or for the iOS.

If it is about iOS, the app is free so you can try it and check whether it has some benefits for you or not.

It is really hard to make the complete list of benefits as there are too many of them, but I'll point to some of them:

• VoiceOver is not content aware. It will read the user interface elements too and quite a lot of junk of the text, actually in many cases junk information may be majority. If you are on the web site, it will read whole the site navigation, for example.
• VoiceOver won't work in the background with the screen off
• VoiceOver won't interact with audio buttons on the headphones.
• You don't have VoiceOver history, favorites, comments, bookmarks
• VoiceOver can't inteligently use multiple voices to indicate content switch
• VoiceOver can't have playlists
• You can't use VoiceOver hands-free
• You cannot easily navigate the content with VoiceOver (like go to the next sentence or next paragraph, or 30 sec ahead, or to the next title and dozen more things)
• You can't change the speed of VoiceOver on the fly.
• If you want to read all supported e-books, office documents, rss feeds, you would need to install dozen of apps with VoiceOver

Really there is much more, but I hope this is enough info for you to try.

Just an FYI, Voice Over is different than Accessibility “Text to Speech” or what now is called in iOS 13 “Spoken Content”. Spoken Content works in the background and even with the screen off. You can change the speed on the fly, and iOS 13 lets the user put the “Speech Controller” always available on your screen. Spoken Content is a screen reader, so, it isn’t necessarily content aware, though it can be, depending on the content.

Thanks for giving more insight into your app. It definitely has a few nice features.

[labsii]

Thanks for giving more insight into your app. It definitely has a few nice features.

Thanks for this comment. Agree with what you said. As you suggested few lines should be removed for this comparison from the list above, but few lines should be added too - like that you can easily interact with headlines to open articles which for example is worse in this mode than with VoiceOver though even there it isn't really practical...