What makes it worth the price.
Latest comment: Im using this app every single day since I bought it!
New comment to iOS 10: Im really happy that we could finally use Siri voices in Voice Dream! Thanks for the enhancement!!!
My first review is below:
I really love listening to eBooks with the Apples built-in "Speak Screen" + iBooks or Kindle.
When I saw Voice Dream, I wondered why people would rather pay for an app which seems to have the same function as the free alternative. After reading many extremely positive and genuine comments, I decided to give it a try. Listening to eBooks is a daily routine for me, any improvement would be highly useful.
Im happy to say that this is one of the best purchases Ive made and I will rate it as 5 stars and an essential app.
A comparison of "Speak Screen + iBooks/Kindle" (SS+i/K) vs "Voice Dream" (VD).
VD: Flawless continuous playing of the text-to-audio.
SS+iBooks: Stop playing whenever a photo is on top of a page.
SS+Kindle: Stop playing whenever you turn off the screen, or switch to another app.
VD: The playback can be paused by remote control button on headset, or a simple double-finger tap on screen.
SS: Can be paused with two one-finger taps. Cannot be paused by headset. Full of bugs if you pressed the remote control button on headset by accident, sometimes required a soft reset to fix the problem.
VD: Just point to any sentence, and it starts reading that particular section.
SS+iBooks: Very difficult to select a paragraph and read that part out.
SS+Kindle: Cant select a part to read it out at all.
VD: Easily see the remaining reading time required for the book, the remaining time changes when you change the reading speed.
SS+i/K: They show nothing about the remaining hours at all, I feel like I was wandering in a jungle.
VD: Highlight the sentence and word in different colours.
SS+iBooks: Highlight a particular word only.
SS+Kindle: Highlight the whole page... it looks weird.
VD: I downloaded the Grahams and Kates voice (UK), wow, it was much better than the built-in voices of iOS.
SS: Even the iOS Siri Male or Alex couldnt match anything remotely similar to the Graham voice.
VD: Its very easy to configure Voice Dream to lock the language preference and force it to read in one single language.
SS: The iOS built-in "Speak Screen" cant distinguish the difference of Asian languages very well, sometimes I listen to eBooks in Chinese and it started reading it in the Japanese or Korean way, which renders the whole passage unintelligible at all. This is the single most annoying bug Ive encountered using the built-in iOS dictation. Voice Dream fixes it.
VD: Another function which I also used daily. It can speed up a podcast! I use RSSRadio to download a local audio news summary, it was ~ 12 minutes. The RSSRadio lets you play the audio at X2 speed, but it was still too slow for me. I could open the podcast in Voice Dream and use it to tune up the speed to X4! Others thought it was not possible to understand, but I know I can still understand it perfectly.
Voice Dream can also double as an audiobook player. Just zip all MP3 files, and it will read out like Audible!
Since I purchased this app, I havent found a day without opening it!
A note to Mr Chen who wrote this wonderful app. Im very happy about my purchase, but the decision process was quite long for me as it was expensive (when compared to other apps on iPhone AppStore). It was well worth the money for me because it does everything not only better , but _*perfectly*_.
However, it was difficult to recommend this app to my friends. Sometimes I had to lend them my iPhone to try it out for a few minutes, but I dont think they could enjoy the benefits of it with such a short time (while I was standing next to them as well).
It would be better if you could bring back the Lite or Trial version, just let people use it to listen to eBooks for 100 minutes for free, Im sure that many people would be happy to pay for your app once they have more time to immerse into the experience.
Pazu Kong, Tibet about
Voice Dream - Read Out Aloud, v4.1.0