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Monday, January 23, 2023

Looking For A Good Text-To-Speech App...


 There was a time when I listened to books, listened to a lot of books. I burned through so many books I was running out audiobooks at our local library.

Not really, but I did run out of books I wanted to read.

I was reading at least one, and sometimes two books every week )then I discovered podcasts and my audiobook listening has dwindled to almost nothing...). I got so addicted to audiobooks, I tried to find an app for my phone that would take any book and turn it into an audiobook, mostly so I could enjoy books written by my author friends whose books were not available in audiobook format.

I finally found an app that worked quite well. It was called PDF to Audio Offline. Today I got a new book to read. I fired up my phone and tried to add it to the app. The problem--I needed to download it again since I hadn't accessed it in some time. That's when I discovered that app was no longer available.

Bummer.

So, I went on a hunt. I searched for a new text-to-speech reader. I found one and started the book. I first tried to increase the reading rate to 1.5 times. It played for a few seconds then I got a message that I would have to pay $12/mth for the privilege of having the material read quicker. 

Nope.

I decided the normal rate would be okay, but I noticed the speech was not reading the words correctly. In fact, it was creating new words that were not in the text, example, it turned "just" into "fust."

Nope.

I downloaded a couple of other apps and haven't been able to get what I once had. I'll need to do more hunting.

We live in such an amazing times. The very thought that we can take any book, download a digital copy, then be able to have a program read it out loud boggles the mind. I'm hoping there's an app out there that will allow me to do it. We'll see.

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