App to read me PDFs

Does anyone know of an app that will read to me? I have pdfs for work that I would like to get dictated tome as I drive or workout. I jsed an app like this maybe 8 years ago and it worked out good, I just can’t remember the name of that app.

Voice Dream Reader is one that I’ve heard about. I don’t have any experience with it.

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I tried Voice Dream Reader briefly, and it worked well.

In this general context, it is worth noting that Acrobat Reader, which is the free app from Adobe to read PDF’s, has a read aloud capability.

Menu: View >> Read Out Load.

You can have it read just the page that is open or the entire document.

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I use voice dream on iPad and iPhone. It’s good.

It’s also worth purchasing one of the better-quality voices if you use it a lot. You won’t grow to love the free Siri voices over time, though they are good enough to see if you like the app.

Reader (the reading app by Readwise) has an audio option and can handle PDFs as well as web articles.

I’ve never used audio like this before but I found it serviceable. It’s still not the same as an actual human, but I’ve not spotted any weird pronunciation or parsing of phrases (except for the place name “Lanzarote”, which it mispronounced and caused me to chuckle :joy: For non-English / Spanish speakers, Lanzarote is pronounced “lan-za-rot-i”, not “lan-za-roat”). I assume in a text laden with non-English place names or technical scientific words it might struggle a bit (e.g. Latin phrases).

It also indicates where in the text it’s reading, which I quite like in case I want to highlight anything (obviously I am not driving whilst listening to this - often I am just washing up!).

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Yes I was going to say this! I don’t use text to audio much but they’re handling of PDFs is very welcome and I did notice they have the audio option.

Nice! Gonna have to check this out

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Another vote for Voice Dream. I like the “Sharon” voice for US and “Emma” for UK English, but there are loads to choose from. As the prices are (or at least were) quite similar, look for the larger files sizes. In my experience, they indicate a bigger vocalbulary and less compression for a more natural sounding result.

That said, there are now also multiple voices to be downloaded for free in iOS. There are “enhanced” voices with higher quality that can be activated instead of the default Siri-voice. You set this up in the “Accessibility” section. This works well in a pinch, and for materials that is less easy to get into Voice Dream - like Kindle books. The experience isn’t as good, but certainly usable and worth configuring.

Another +1 for Voice Dream Reader here. You set it to ignore header and footer sections of a PDF so they don’t get read on every page. You can also tell it how to pronounce certain words which is very useful for technical documentation.