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Old 03-16-2014, 07:39 AM
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SantaClaus SantaClaus is offline
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I recently purchased Voice Dream Reader and am very pleased with it. It reads aloud to you in a pretty natural voice (actually, a dozen or more voices are available). As it reads it highlights the text, so you can follow along. It has easy controls to skip forward or back, adjust text size, and even change the rate at which it reads. It can load books directly from Project Gutenburg (45K books!), read the text of a Web site or a PDF, or anything you can load into your clipboard. It can also read any text you add to another service, Pocket. Pocket is a simple way to mark web content that you want to read later, like news stories. So, for instance, you could scan through your favorite news sources, mark a bunch of articles to Pocket, and then in VDR load them and have it read them to you as you drive, exercise, whatever. Pretty nice. VDR is a bit expensive, I think it was about $10 and more for additional voices. But that's pretty cheap compared to a similar program I have on my computer which cost $40. The only downsides of VDR are: it cannot read most purchased iBooks (blame iTunes), and it cannot save the audio (to share, for instance). BTW, I looked at several other text to speech apps and found that all of the good quality ones required subscriptions, which would cost you more in the long run. I does have a free demo version if you'd like to try it out (reads for 10 mins a day, I think?). Enjoy!