Sometimes, it'south meliorate to listen than to read. When yous walk, bike, or bulldoze, for example, it's safer to keep your eyes focused on the world around you.

Text-to-speech (TTS) offers an alternative to listening to music, podcasts, or audiobooks. TTS can be a bang-up mode to take hold of upwardly on articles y'all intend to read. For instance, Mozilla'southward read later service, Pocket, includes the power to listen to articles.

TTS solves a slightly dissimilar 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 four TTS apps specialize in reading articles and documents y'all choose. While all of these apps provide text-to-speech communication capabilities, each app serves a slightly dissimilar set up of needs. Some apps show the text as it is spoken, while others offering a variety of voices.

All of these apps piece of work on iOS, and support the capability to share an article from the browser to the app via the native iOS sharing organization functions. Importantly, as of July 2017, all 4 of these apps are under agile development: The iOS app for each was updated in June or July 2017 at to the lowest degree in one case.

1. Motoread

(iOS, Chrome, and Safari desktop extensions)

I retrieve of Motoread as a podcatcher for manufactures: Send an article to the app, then listen to saved articles later. In that location are Chrome and Safari extensions that permit you add an article to your Motoread list from your desktop browser with a click. (As of early July 2017, an Android app is listed as "coming soon".)

The app reads articles in a single phonation, although you may adapt the playback speed. You tin can also choose to display the text of the commodity as you heed. The app is gratis, although yous can upgrade (for $1.99/calendar month or $19.99/twelvemonth) to get the ability to add an unlimited number of manufactures.

2. Voice Dream Reader

(iOS, Android)

Vocalisation Dream Reader shows the text of the article beingness read, and highlights each give-and-take equally information technology is spoken. Since the app was originally developed as an assistive tool, you can adjust the size, font, spacing, and color of the text displayed during playback. Voice Dream supports adjustable playback speeds, and allows you to customize pause time betwixt sentences, too. Y'all tin select from several arrangement voices, and fix a preferred speed, pitch, and volume for the voice. You can as well add documents to listen to from Dropbox, Google Bulldoze, Evernote, and other sources.

Voice Dream Reader typically costs $14.99, and a broad selection of boosted voices are available for purchase, too–at a cost of upwards to $4.99 per voice.

three. Speech Central

(iOS, macOS, Windows, Android)

Speech Central works on more platforms than whatever of the other apps here, with apps available for iOS, macOS, Windows, and Android (although the app is available from Amazon, not the Google Play shop). Information technology too supports the ability to read text from other formats, such equally Word, PDF, and more. On iOS, the app supports the organization voices, although you can adjust the vocalism 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 forth the left side of the text of the paragraph every bit it is spoken. The app will denote the calculated reading time for longer manufactures, which may be useful if you listen while traveling, and you tin change playback speed (betwixt .8x and 2x default speed). Spoken communication Fundamental also offers the power to shuffle voices, so you lot don't have to listen to several articles in a row read with the aforementioned synthesized voice.

The desktop platform apps are not costless, at $6.99 for macOS and $9.99 for Windows 10, although the mobile apps are gratuitous, with an optional one-fourth dimension $4.99 upgrade that gives you lot the ability to add unlimited articles.

4. Audiobook Maker

(iOS)

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

Audiobook Maker as well was the only app with the option to display one word at a fourth dimension, centered in the screen. It likewise offered an option to highlight the word being read, while showing the surrounding text, in an adaptable size font. Equally with other apps, you can adjust the speed, likewise every bit select from several voices and languages.

Audiobook Maker evolution is still in process. For example, 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 photo of a folio from a volume, 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-speech works and the app is gratuitous (as of July 2017).

Text to speech for developers

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

Do you lot use text-to-voice communication to listen to articles or documents? If and so, what text-to-voice communication organization and/or app do you employ? And if you're a developer, have you integrated one of higher up API text-to-speech communication services into your app? If so, let me know which service and why — on Twitter (@awolber) or in the comments beneath.