I have an app on my iPhone called Voice Dream Reader that I like, and I’m looking for something similar for the Mac. I know that exact app is available for Mac, but it’s a $60/year subscription - and I just don’t use it all that often. It’s also a bit choppy sometimes.
With all the cool AI stuff swirling around right now, I’m wondering if anybody has seen any newer apps that do a good job of turning things like ePubs into speech.
Thoughts?
Speechify does AI text-to-speech, and they have a Mac app. You can probably figure out a workflow that would get it to read an ePub. The downside is that the premium plan is $140/year that locks features like faster playback speeds. There is a free version that will give you enough of a taste to decide whether it’s for you or not. My visually-impaired wife has tried it, and really likes it but we’ve not been able to justify the cost of Premium yet. The voices sound very natural, and the OCR is very good for pictures like recipes and menus.
What about the Readwise Reader?
I just downloaded it to play around with it, and I can’t find a way to get it to read an ePub to me. The web view (which is all it seems Reader is at this point?) let me upload my ePub, but I can’t seem to tell it to read it out loud.
Have you used it? Is there something obvious I’m missing?
ETA: Also, the pricing for Reader looks like it’s going to be no less than $84/year. They haven’t announced pricing yet, but they’re saying that if you subscribe NOW it’ll be no more than that. It would have to be pretty awesome for me to spend more than the app I’m already hoping not to use. 
As far as I understand, Text-to-speech is currently only available on their mobile Apps.
I have tried it, and it is pretty good, beside that it is not able to “read” German yet, and the Outcome of a german text sounds like some kind of Extraterrestrial language.
I have not tried it on ePUP yet, as I do not use this format, but as far as I understand, it should also work.
Beside Text-to-speech, they also offer a “Ghostreader” (GPT-3) who should be able to summarize a document, or answer questions regarding the document. I haven’t tried this yet.
Here is a long Q&A for Readwise Reader
I am not sure about the current beta status, but they told me, that if I subscribe during their public beta, I would keep this price as a “lifetime pricing”.
As the Readwise Reader seems to be currently the best one in this sector, I went this way.