Sometimes, it'southward better to listen than to read. When you walk, bike, or drive, for example, it'south safer to keep your eyes focused on the world around you lot.

Text-to-voice communication (TTS) offers an culling to listening to music, podcasts, or audiobooks. TTS tin can exist a great mode to grab up on articles you intend to read. For example, Mozilla's read later service, Pocket, includes the ability to listen to articles.

TTS solves a slightly different problem than the assistive voice capabilities available for the major platforms, such as Android TalkBack, iOS VoiceOver, Chromevox, Windows Narrator, and Mac VoiceOver. These tools typically read everything on a page–content plus navigation.

The following iv TTS apps specialize in reading articles and documents yous choose. While all of these apps provide text-to-spoken communication capabilities, each app serves a slightly unlike set of needs. Some apps show the text as it is spoken, while others offering a diverseness of voices.

All of these apps work on iOS, and support the capability to share an article from the browser to the app via the native iOS sharing organization functions. Chiefly, as of July 2017, all four of these apps are under active development: The iOS app for each was updated in June or July 2017 at least once.

1. Motoread

(iOS, Chrome, and Safari desktop extensions)

I call back of Motoread as a podcatcher for articles: Transport an article to the app, so mind to saved articles subsequently. There are Chrome and Safari extensions that let you add an commodity to your Motoread listing from your desktop browser with a click. (Every bit of early July 2017, an Android app is listed as "coming soon".)

The app reads manufactures in a single voice, although you may adjust the playback speed. You tin can also cull to display the text of the article as you listen. The app is free, although you can upgrade (for $1.99/calendar month or $xix.99/year) to get the power to add an unlimited number of articles.

two. Voice Dream Reader

(iOS, Android)

Voice Dream Reader shows the text of the commodity being read, and highlights each word as information technology is spoken. Since the app was originally developed every bit an assistive tool, you can adjust the size, font, spacing, and colour of the text displayed during playback. Voice Dream supports adjustable playback speeds, and allows you to customize suspension time between sentences, as well. Y'all tin select from several system voices, and gear up a preferred speed, pitch, and volume for the voice. Y'all can also add documents to listen to from Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, and other sources.

Vocalization Dream Reader typically costs $xiv.99, and a wide selection of additional voices are available for purchase, likewise–at a cost of up to $four.99 per voice.

3. Speech Central

(iOS, macOS, Windows, Android)

Speech Central works on more platforms than whatever of the other apps hither, with apps bachelor for iOS, macOS, Windows, and Android (although the app is bachelor from Amazon, not the Google Play store). It also supports the ability to read text from other formats, such as Word, PDF, and more. On iOS, the app supports the organisation voices, although you can adjust the vox pitch, every bit well as the default 1x speed to be slightly faster or slower.

Speech Central shows the text, with a subtle colored vertical line displayed along the left side of the text of the paragraph as it is spoken. The app volition announce the calculated reading fourth dimension for longer articles, which may be useful if you listen while traveling, and yous tin can change playback speed (between .8x and 2x default speed). Speech Central too offers the ability to shuffle voices, and then you lot don't take to listen to several articles in a row read with the same synthesized voice.

The desktop platform apps are non free, at $6.99 for macOS and $ix.99 for Windows 10, although the mobile apps are free, with an optional one-time $4.99 upgrade that gives y'all the ability to add unlimited articles.

4. Audiobook Maker

(iOS)

Audiobook Maker was the only app of the four to properly pronounce the words "alive" and "livestream" with the default voice setting. All the other apps pronounced the four letter word "live" incorrectly for the context, as if it rhymed with "give." Audiobook Maker pronounced it correctly: "Live" rhymes with "hive."

Audiobook Maker too was the just app with the option to display one word at a time, centered in the screen. It also offered an option to highlight the word beingness read, while showing the surrounding text, in an adjustable size font. Every bit with other apps, you can adjust the speed, as well as select from several voices and languages.

Audiobook Maker development is all the same in procedure. For instance, the app also includes the ability to use your photographic camera to take a photo of volume pages to be read. But when I took a photograph of a page from a book, I saw a "less than a minute remaining" message that never left. To be fair, the iOS app is named "Audiobook Maker – Early Adopters." That said, the core functionality of text-to-voice communication works and the app is costless (equally of July 2017).

Text to spoken communication for developers

It's likewise never been easier to add text-to-voice communication capabilities to apps. Several large firms provide text-to-spoken communication API services, such as Polly from Amazon, Bing Speech from Microsoft, and Text to Speech from IBM. There are smaller competitors in the field, similar Responsive Voice, too. And search giants Google and Baidu have each released research papers that tout their progress toward increasingly natural sounding text-to-speech capabilities, chosen Deep WaveNet and Deep Vox 2, respectively.

Practice you use text-to-speech communication to mind to manufactures or documents? If so, what text-to-speech organization and/or app practise you lot utilise? And if yous're a developer, have y'all integrated i of in a higher place API text-to-speech services into your app? If so, let me know which service and why — on Twitter (@awolber) or in the comments below.