New Version of Voice Dream: first-rate program for reading e-books aloud

A new incarnation of the Voice Dream text-to-speech program–for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch–hit the Apple app store recently.

voice dreamLibraryCity’s original Voice Dream review is here. Price is $9.99, still worth every penny.

Winston Chen, the developer, has made good on his promise to offer a paging option, so that you don’t have to scroll, Web-browser fashion, if you’re reading an e-book by sight. The downside of a beta was that if you made annotations, Voice Dream lapsed back into its scrolling made. As far as I can tell–maybe I’m wrong–that bug is gone from the current version, 2.8.2

Now I’m hoping for other refinements such as synchronization of e-book collections on different devices, of annotations, and of “last page read.” This could happen by way of the Dropbox cloud or otherwise. My favorite voice from Voice Dream’s built-in store right now is “Peter,” a British-accented baritone available for just $1.99, and meanwhile I’ve suggested to Winston that he do his best to be able to offer another U.K. gem, “Amy.”

I’d also like to see arrangements for Voice Dream to work with DRMed books, especially library ones distributed by OverDrive and other vendors. And if Winston can release versions for Android and other platforms beyond iOS, so much the better.

Odds and ends: The Voice Dream Web site is back up after a brief outage. Also, the image is from an older version of Voice Dream.

Editor’s note – this article was re-published with the author’s permission from his blog, Library City.

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