Sometimes, information technology's better to listen than to read. When you walk, wheel, or bulldoze, for case, it'southward safer to go along your eyes focused on the earth around you.

Text-to-speech (TTS) offers an alternative to listening to music, podcasts, or audiobooks. TTS can be a groovy way to grab up on articles you intend to read. For example, Mozilla's read later service, Pocket, includes the ability to listen to articles.

TTS solves a slightly different trouble than the assistive vocalization 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 folio–content plus navigation.

The following four TTS apps specialize in reading articles and documents you choose. While all of these apps provide text-to-speech capabilities, each app serves a slightly dissimilar set of needs. Some apps testify the text every bit it is spoken, while others offering a variety of voices.

All of these apps work on iOS, and back up 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 four of these apps are under active evolution: The iOS app for each was updated in June or July 2017 at to the lowest degree one time.

1. Motoread

(iOS, Chrome, and Safari desktop extensions)

I think of Motoread as a podcatcher for articles: Send an article to the app, then listen to saved articles later. There are Chrome and Safari extensions that allow you add an commodity to your Motoread list from your desktop browser with a click. (Every bit of early July 2017, an Android app is listed every bit "coming soon".)

The app reads manufactures in a unmarried voice, although you may conform the playback speed. You can as well choose to display the text of the article equally you listen. The app is free, although you can upgrade (for $1.99/month or $19.99/year) to become the ability to add an unlimited number of manufactures.

2. Voice Dream Reader

(iOS, Android)

Voice Dream Reader shows the text of the article being read, and highlights each word as it is spoken. Since the app was originally developed as an assistive tool, yous can adjust the size, font, spacing, and color of the text displayed during playback. Voice Dream supports adaptable playback speeds, and allows you to customize pause time between sentences, too. You can select from several organization voices, and set up a preferred speed, pitch, and volume for the voice. You lot can also add documents to mind to from Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, and other sources.

Voice Dream Reader typically costs $xiv.99, and a wide option of additional voices are available for purchase, too–at a cost of upwardly to $four.99 per voice.

iii. Speech Central

(iOS, macOS, Windows, Android)

Spoken language Central works on more platforms than any of the other apps here, with apps available for iOS, macOS, Windows, and Android (although the app is bachelor from Amazon, not the Google Play store). Information technology also supports the ability to read text from other formats, such as Word, PDF, and more. On iOS, the app supports the system voices, although you can arrange the voice pitch, every bit well every bit the default 1x speed to exist slightly faster or slower.

Spoken language Central shows the text, with a subtle colored vertical line displayed along the left side of the text of the paragraph equally information technology is spoken. The app volition announce the calculated reading fourth dimension for longer manufactures, which may exist useful if you listen while traveling, and you can change playback speed (between .8x and 2x default speed). Speech Primal likewise offers the ability to shuffle voices, and then y'all don't have to listen to several manufactures in a row read with the same synthesized voice.

The desktop platform apps are not gratuitous, at $6.99 for macOS and $9.99 for Windows ten, although the mobile apps are free, with an optional onetime $four.99 upgrade that gives you the ability to add unlimited manufactures.

4. Audiobook Maker

(iOS)

Audiobook Maker was the just app of the four to properly pronounce the words "live" and "livestream" with the default voice setting. All the other apps pronounced the four letter give-and-take "live" incorrectly for the context, as if it rhymed with "give." Audiobook Maker pronounced it correctly: "Live" rhymes with "hive."

Audiobook Maker also was the only app with the option to brandish ane give-and-take at a time, centered in the screen. It also offered an option to highlight the word being read, while showing the surrounding text, in an adjustable size font. As with other apps, you tin can adjust the speed, as well as select from several voices and languages.

Audiobook Maker development is still in process. For example, the app besides includes the ability to use your photographic camera to have a photo of volume pages to be read. But when I took a photo of a page from a book, 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-oral communication works and the app is free (as of July 2017).

Text to spoken communication for developers

Information technology'due south also never been easier to add text-to-speech capabilities to apps. Several large firms provide text-to-speech API services, such every bit Polly from Amazon, Bing Speech from Microsoft, and Text to Speech from IBM. There are smaller competitors in the field, like Responsive Voice, too. And search giants Google and Baidu have each released inquiry papers that tout their progress toward increasingly natural sounding text-to-speech capabilities, called Deep WaveNet and Deep Voice 2, respectively.

Exercise yous use text-to-speech to heed to manufactures or documents? If so, what text-to-speech system and/or app do you utilise? And if yous're a developer, have you integrated i of above API text-to-speech services into your app? If so, let me know which service and why — on Twitter (@awolber) or in the comments below.