Sometimes, it's better to heed than to read. When you lot walk, bike, or drive, for example, information technology's safer to continue your eyes focused on the earth effectually you.

Text-to-speech (TTS) offers an alternative to listening to music, podcasts, or audiobooks. TTS can be a great fashion to take hold of up on articles you intend to read. For example, Mozilla's read later service, Pocket, includes the power to listen to articles.

TTS solves a slightly different 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 post-obit 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 different ready of needs. Some apps bear witness the text as it is spoken, while others offer a variety of voices.

All of these apps work on iOS, and support the capability to share an article from the browser to the app via the native iOS sharing organisation functions. Chiefly, every bit of July 2017, all four of these apps are under active development: The iOS app for each was updated in June or July 2017 at least once.

1. Motoread

(iOS, Chrome, and Safari desktop extensions)

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

The app reads articles in a single voice, although you may adjust the playback speed. You can likewise choose to brandish the text of the article as you heed. The app is gratis, although you tin upgrade (for $1.99/month or $19.99/year) to go the ability to add together an unlimited number of articles.

2. Vox 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 adult as an assistive tool, y'all can accommodate the size, font, spacing, and colour of the text displayed during playback. Voice Dream supports adjustable playback speeds, and allows y'all to customize pause time between sentences, too. You tin select from several system voices, and gear up a preferred speed, pitch, and volume for the voice. You can as well add together documents to listen to from Dropbox, Google Bulldoze, Evernote, and other sources.

Voice Dream Reader typically costs $14.99, and a wide selection of boosted voices are available for buy, too–at a price of up to $4.99 per vocalism.

3. Spoken language Central

(iOS, macOS, Windows, Android)

Oral communication Cardinal works on more platforms than whatsoever 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 store). It besides supports the ability to read text from other formats, such as Word, PDF, and more. On iOS, the app supports the organisation voices, although you can adjust the voice pitch, as well as the default 1x speed to exist slightly faster or slower.

Speech Central shows the text, with a subtle colored vertical line displayed along the left side of the text of the paragraph as it is spoken. The app will announce the calculated reading time for longer articles, which may be useful if y'all listen while traveling, and you can change playback speed (betwixt .8x and 2x default speed). Speech Central as well offers the ability to shuffle voices, so you don't have to mind to several articles in a row read with the same synthesized voice.

The desktop platform apps are non free, at $6.99 for macOS and $ix.99 for Windows 10, although the mobile apps are free, with an optional i-time $iv.99 upgrade that gives yous the power to add unlimited articles.

4. Audiobook Maker

(iOS)

Audiobook Maker was the only 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 display one word at a time, centered in the screen. It also offered an option to highlight the give-and-take being read, while showing the surrounding text, in an adjustable size font. Every bit with other apps, you can suit the speed, too as select from several voices and languages.

Audiobook Maker evolution is still in process. For example, the app also includes the ability to use your camera to take 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 infinitesimal 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 complimentary (equally of July 2017).

Text to speech for developers

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

Do you use text-to-speech communication to listen to articles or documents? If so, what text-to-voice communication system and/or app do yous use? And if you're a programmer, have you integrated one 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.