Text to speech (TTS) iOS apps which uses ML-powered voice

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1

I’m subscribed to some excellent-but-lengthy newsletters (e.g. Byrne Hobart) which I’d like to listen to while I walk.

The TTS apps I’ve experimented with all sound annoyingly robotic.

Amazon and Google both offer ML-powered voice synthesis APIs which sound so much better, but I can’t find any iOS apps which actually use them.

Any recommendations?

2

I don’t know any that uses these. On iOS I think the best voice is the Siri voice in system spoken content. The Ivona voices in Voice Dream reader are not bad either.

3

I’m beta testing audyo.ai which is very impressive. But it can’t (yet) take PDF and epub uploads like Voice Dream Reader, so I use that too.

4

I really like the “Sharon” voice pack from Acapela. I am using it within the Voice Dream app.

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5

Wow. The Audyo.ai demo sounds significantly better than anything in VoiceDream.

I’ve applied for the beta.

It’s a shame there don’t appear to be any modern (i.e. ML-powered) TTS apps already in the App Store.

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6

Just posting a quick “thanks” for the app suggestion. I’m trying to listen to more fiction, and I just started in on the Star Wars: Thrawn trilogy. I hate when the “dramatization” wrecks the quality of professionally-produced ebooks. In this case, characters in the book talking over static-y comms are almost unlistenable for me. They actually try to reproduce the “bad audio over comms” experience for the listener.

This app saved my bacon. Once I mentally re-mapped some of it’s non-standard pronunciations, it turned a garden-variety ePub into a very listenable audiobook. Professional, non-dramatized narration would obviously still be better - but given that doesn’t exist, this app is a lifesaver!

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