Voice Dream for Desktop

Category

Description of App

Requires sign-in and paid subscription. 14-day free trial.

Voice Dream Reader lets you listen to PDF documents, Web articles, and eBooks using text-to-speech. Although it is designed for people with visual impairment, dyslexia, ADHD, and other reading challenges, everyone can benefit. Your documents become audiobooks, so you can read while you walk, exercise or do chores. For productivity-minded people, with some practice, you can read at twice your sight-reading speed. Unlike audiobooks, you can highlight, take notes, and see the words as they're spoken to improve comprehension and retention.

Voice Dream Reader for iOS is a 2021 Apple Design Award Winner, and it's been featured by Apple as Best New App and App of the Day in 81 countries. Using the award-winning iOS app as building blocks, we wrote Voice Dream Reader Desktop from ground up as a native macOS app with a completely redesigned user interface. The result is a full-featured, desktop-class application fully optimized for the Mac.

ACCOLADES

"Both experts recommend Voice Dream Reader as the best app in the text-to-speech space." - Wired

“This app is one of the best educational finds of my entire career.” - Forbes

“As a user myself and as a mother of a child with dyslexia, I am blown away by the features of Voice Dream.” - Quartz

FEATURES

Library
  • Manage all your reading material in one place.
  • Organize in folders. Search, filter and sort.
  • Keep a Reading List so you never run out of things to read.
  • Synchronize your library, reading locations, bookmarks and notes across all your Apple devices.
  • Your library stays private on your device, or in iCloud Drive if you synchronize. No-one else has access.
Text-to-Speech
  • 75 text-to-speech voices in 27 languages.
  • All voices are offline to protect your privacy.
  • Correct pronunciation with your own pronunciation rules.
Document Formats
  • PDF, plain text, and Google Docs.
  • Text recognition for scanned PDF.
  • Skip repeating headers and footers in PDF.
  • Web articles via Safari Extension.
  • Bookshare books via built-in interface.
  • EPUB eBooks. (DRM-free books only. Kindle, iBooks and most commercial eBook platforms are encrypted.)
  • DAISY text-based books and audiobooks.
  • Audiobooks in MP3, MP4 or zipped MP3 format.
  • Native access for Dropbox and Google Drive.
Reading Styles
  • Highlight spoken word to improve comprehension and retention.
  • Change font, colors, character and line spacing, and margins.
  • Auto-scrolling and full screen, distraction-free mode to help with focus.
  • Two speed-reading modes: Pac-Man and RSVP.
  • Optimized for accessibility including VoiceOver.
  • High contrast and large font size for low vision readers.
Studying Tools
  • Bookmark, highlight and take notes.
  • Export highlights and notes.
  • Full-text search.
  • Built-in dictionary.
Notes for iOS Users
  • Only macOS system voices are supported.
  • Acapela voices will be available in a future update.
  • Ivona and NeoSpeech voices do not run on macOS.
  • Word, PowerPoint and RTF support will come in a future update.
  • Pocket and Instapaper support is coming soon.
  • Evernote does not support third party access on macOS.

SUBSCRIPTION

Voice Dream Reader Desktop requires a subscription, but we offer a 14-day free trial before you get charged, so you can find out if this app is right for you. The subscription is separate from Voice Dream Reader for iOS. Please visit our blog ([http://www.voicedream.com/blog]) to find out why this app requires a subscription.

[Terms of Use EULA](https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ more)

Version

1.0.3

Free or Paid

Requires Subscription

Version Of macOS App Was Tested On

12.4

Accessibility Comments

L'application est très accessible.

Usability

The app is fully accessible with VoiceOver and is easy to navigate and use.
Developer's Twitter Username
@voicedreamapp

Recommendations

2 people have recommended this app

Most recently recommended by Adam Samec 2 years 3 months ago

Options

Comments

By Holger Fiallo on Tuesday, June 7, 2022 - 20:08

Be nice if the app is also for Windows. Most of us use Windows instead of Mac.

By Chris on Tuesday, June 7, 2022 - 20:08

Bookworm is available for Windows and does a lot of what this app does. I'm not sure if it would be worth the time and effort to port it to Windows when we have Bookworm.
https://getbookworm.com/

By MarkSarch on Wednesday, September 7, 2022 - 20:08

Hello
I am having some issues in order to activate the payment subscription the trial version has expired and I haven't figure out how to activate the subscription
under preferences
command + comma
account
there not way to activate the payment subscription
Also under apple menu I couldn't find any way to do it
If any one has some idea how to do it let me know

By PaulMartz on Friday, April 7, 2023 - 20:08

I'm new to Voice Dream Reader. I just downloaded version 1.3.1 for the Mac this morning and I'm trying it for the first time.

The review above claims the app is optimized for accessibility including VoiceOver. However, basic VoiceOver navigation appears to be non-functional. VO+A, read by character, word, sentence, or paragraph, spell word, text selection, do not work.

Oh, I can navigate into the reader window and the commands work there, but they use the VoiceOver voice, not the Voice Dream Reader voice. And my VoiceOver focus in the reader window doesn't follow the Voice Dream Reader audio focus, so I have to VO+F to find what I was just listening to.

What if I have a Word doc and want to leave track changes or comments in the document? I can edit the text directly and make changes, but there's no way to provide editor feedback using track changes or comments, as far as I can tell.

It seems like this app is okay for reading documents aloud, but if you want to do anything truly useful with the text, it falls hopelessly short. Am I missing something?

By Igna Triay on Friday, April 7, 2023 - 20:08

This app is mainly meant to read stuff, not what your trying to do as far as edit. For that use a text editor, but yeah, editing text and writing comments... You'd be better to use a text editor for that, as again, this app is mainly for reading documents, not really for editing them. but voice dream' isn't a text editor. I suppose it can be if you really need that but its not its primary function.