Voicedream: to renew or not to renew?

I will never subscribe they are having issues left and right. Not worth $10 let alone $60. Note I do subscribe to apps just won't ever subscribe to that one.

Like you, I shelled out their subscription fee last year, and like you, my socks have not been dislodged via voice Dream's hurricane winds. I have already cancelled my automatic renewal. Maybe if their AI voices were somewhat competent and not just trying to lazily build on the acapela voices, ones which already were not very good in my ears, then maybe so. But they unfortunately failed.
On a somewhat unrelated note, when I use the Voice Dream Scanner app, now renamed on the home screen to VD Scan, am I the only one that yells out to those around that I'm about to perform a VD scan?

... if you happen to be a Mac user as well. Otherwise no. Literally that is the only feature I want from the subscription. And I don't even use iCloud sync because the app reacts very, very badly to being throttled by Apple, so I just disable sync. I obviously resent subscribing just for that but I do still use the app for most of my hands-off text reading, with Eloquence no less. I've never been truly happy with SpeechCentral, maybe I'll try harder to make it work, but it has far too many undocumented controls for my taste. For most book and audiobook reading/listening I'm back to using Apple books. And I access RNIB and Calibre through EasyReader. I'm probably overpaying for all this stuff but I've never been happy with the options available, so that's where things stand for me.

It's not being throttled by apple at all but very poorly coded and this date to before the horrible acquisition, basically it does veri weird preprocessing on each file so it compounds and slow down the sync 100x. No, now voicedream is nothing than a scam, they are cleverly trying to force existing users to pay.
In the voice selection you have the subscription popup that blocks explore by touch, your best bet is to do 4 finger swipe down go to end of creen, and carefully do swipe left/right to get to your desired voice. Even then after you put it as default no matter how you change the speech rate or other parameters the voice doesn't accelerate, in fact it stays the exact same as the default. This app is literally nothing less than a scam now. Contact apple for bad practice because according to their own terms nobody can remove features the users previously paid for. This app is just bad.
In my opinion applevis should hide it from the recommended list cause it doesn't reflect at all the current state of the app, just look at the reviews on the appstore.
Don't ever give them money please. Speech central, while lacking accapela voices and eloquence speed being slow for me, is a very good app, the dev genuinely wants the best for blind users, he's very open and quick to answer support or fix bugs... I feel bad for the original developer to see what crap they've made of his hard work now.

I will argue with anyone that Voice Dream is not a great reading app, and I will argue in favor of Voice Dream as it is really a great app for reading, especially long books. However, more and more, I am using ElevenLabs app to read. However, Voice Dream does continue to have less reading issues than the ElevenLabs app. As long as they will continue to honor the pre-existing users of the app, I will continue to use Voice Dream to read longer books, even if the quality of the voices is not quite as good. The main problem I have with a Voice Dream subscription is that they are trying to justify $60.00 per year with poor AI voices and no other worthwhile improvements to justify their price.

I never used Voice Dream Reader for text to speech, only for listening to audiobooks. Back when VDR started charging, I just went out and found a free audiobook player called BookPlayer and switched to using it. I've never used VDR since then and will never give them any more of my money. I bought and paid for VDR initially and feel I should not have to pay more. I'm quite happy with the BookPlayer app. In fact, I like it even more than VDR because it supports the airPods remote control feature which VDR did not when I was using it.

Re syncing, I dunno, CloudKit does have its issues. The main thread shouldn't block, sure, but it can't be right that merely going offline suddenly makes it work fine. Not defending it but ...

The quality of the app is questionable, but it works. Applause, who by the way have now just recently acquired Strongbox, another favourite of mine, seem to be doing a sort of managed decline, with increasing rough edges, lag and analytics, with the odd bug fix, and bug added, but not adding anything meaningful. If I could have it without paying, well I would. But it's not completely useless. It's just not the great app it once was.

I had my value removed because of what I mentioned above... Wow, sad to hear! I use 1password.

I don't think I've changed the voice in VDR for months, I had to change it back to Neospeech Paul after an upgrade and that's where it stays. I can still change speech rate, and it still reads Bookshare better than anything else I've tried.

There really isn't much money in Apps, so every day that things keep working is a bonus if you ask me. I would subscribe, if I knew readking Kindle books worked well.

Here's what I mean about not much money in apps: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/03/17/1946256/sobering-revenue-stats-of-70k-mobile-apps-show-why-devs-beg-for-subscriptions?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

I do like the fact that Voice Dream Reader can handle both audio books as well as text books in a variety of formats. It is nice to keep all of one's reading material in one place and organized by folders.

That being said, there are many other good options out there that dont cost that much money.

--Pete

Ever since I saw the shift to subscription and that it was $60 per year I went yeah no... It’s not worth it especially given the asking price. If they where doing a good job with adding new features I could see where $60 per year would have a case for this but, as it is now... Its not justifiable, in my opinion. I found found alternatives, and frankly, haven't looked back. Looks like I dodged a bullet by not subscribing. For what your getting $60 per year is not worth it at all. With that beeing said, sad to see this app go downhill do to, let's be honest, greed on applause's part but, oh well.

I refused to pay the new company a dime and still get everything I needed from VoiceDream that I bought it for a decade ago. I will never pay the scammy company that bought it a single penny. And what is up with them constantly changing the name, each iteration getting dumber? Ugh.

As stated earlier for me I even lost what I had their accapela voices are at a fixed rate and to get then as default in the first place is a pain. Ain't no way for me to pay something I had for free and that was working relatively well before.

I don't get the why. I mean the app was working fine before applause came along and, broke it, so to speak. I mean, if it was working fine before... Why fix it? Other than a cash grab, that's the only explanation which imho, makes sence. If they had added more features and you know, actually innovated more than what they did... sure but, given what your getting it feels like a cash grab more than anything else, to be honest.

Hi, I just got my subscription renewal reminder email and sadly I can't justify renewing either. I gave them a shot for year one but so far they've done nothing to motivate me to do so again. It still makes me sad because I remember that which used to be. But I'm told there are other alternatives and I won't miss it. Time will tell I suppose. Ah well.

Just to note that the claim that the app uses CloudKit and that it causes the problem is completely wrong. The app uses on iCloud file sync, which is expected to cause the problems that you see as meta data is not intended to be synced that way.

CloudKit works great, try sync in my Speech Central or in any Apple's app (Reminders, Calendar, Notes). It doesn't require main thread, it is CoreData that in some cases requires it (and that may be used in the pair with CloudKit), but that shouldn't freeze any properly written app.

Unfortunately Speech Central can't invest time and money in technologies that are not actively developed anymore. According to Acapela official web site they grant their voices to work only on iOS 13, which is likely the last date that they have been updated. However Speech Central does provide cloud based solutions that are in most parameters superior, and there might be some offline solutions later this year if tests show that they meet requirements.

Regarding ElevenLabs, it may be useful to know that they have published their future pricing on the App Store and that it will cost $200/year. They haven't started to apply that pricing yet, but considering that they had first promised to start charging in September 2024 and postponed till now, it is likely that charging is coming very soon.

you've done an admirable job of making sure Speech Central stays free. The only reason I don't use it more often is that the voices I have access to don't always meet my needs. Would it be possible to add high quality voices to Speech central for purchase? Ivona is dead, but there are others. And while it would be great if those voices were free, I imagine that purchasing the rights to use those voices would cost you a pretty penny. you would be perfectly within your rights to charge for theim if you could include them in your app.

I have mostly answered that. You can have high quality voices in Speech Central, you can pick out of three providers: Microsoft, OpenAI and Google at the moment. Some of those voices are as high quality as possible, like that maybe studio quality voices that costs $100/month might be slightly better. And some of them come with big free tiers.

I cannot make decisions for other companies. Any company that still develops offline voices for the iPhone would release their voices in the App Store as it is possible for three years now.

I can just add that Acapela may be doing some private, exclusive and fairly limited development for Voice Dream. They certainly made their old Mac voices work on new Apple laptops and that is available exclusively to Voice Dream. Regarding those recent Acapela AI voices, based on some preliminary user reviews it seems that those are not new voices, but that Voice Dream has copied like 2-3 out of few dozens of factors used in Speech Central Emulate Book Reading and applied it to existing Acapela voices and rebranded those as AI. We will never know as, again, it could be that Acapela made some private development for them and neither side will disclose that.

thanks for your reply. Could you recommend a free tier high quality voice to try with Speech Central? I tried setting up Microsoft But it seems fairly complicated. likewise with OpenAI.

I am not sure if you have followed the instructions in the help or you have tried just by searching Google. In general it should take like 5 minutes (maybe slightly more if you don't have Microsoft account at all). Also I haven't checked in details if there are some accessibility problems on their website, but most pages look like very plain forms that should be accessible.

In the case that you were searching with Google, try to follow instructions from the help, links in there that lead you directly to forms should make it fairly easy to do: https://speechcentral.net/ios-help/#azure

This is certainly not one click purchase to make it work, but as far as I can tell most people can complete that on their own using those instructions. If you fail on some specific step you can ask for clarification and I'll update the instructions to make it more clear.

It seems that to use the Azure service, one needs a credit card of some sort. As I don't have one at the moment, the Neural voices aren't available for me. I was looking for the extras section in the Mac version, which is where I use Speech Central most often. Again, sorry for any problems I may have caused.

Wait, we have acapela voices on apple silicon now? Please correct my misunderstanding if any.
My praises again to SC, this app and the dev behind it deserve every award they can get. Making an apparent blindness exclusive app a mainstream success or vice versa with this amazing pricing model in the world of sas we have now is nothing less than extremely admirable.

Technically yes, but only in Voice Dream for Mac. They are not available to other developers or to end users, They provide only voices for Intel Macs officially, which is useless in 2025.

Acapela is 100% dead if you don't use Voice Dream, and if you use it it is still like 95% dead (it is likely to work for a long time but also almost certain not to receive much of improvements).

I can't advise Voice Dream users on what to do, but for other people it is time to move on. Acapela has decided to leave the market and it is not worth to waste more time on debates regarding it.

Certainly everyone who wants can contact Acapela (I am not sure if that is a proper name as the company is now acquired so this is more like a brand now) and try to persuade them to keep developing their abandoned product. Personally I don't believe that it can lead to some results, but you never know until you try.

Are there any other TTS solutions for the Mac? Or are we limited to Apple and the AI voices we can get to work in which apps allow them?

As far as I know, CereProc voices still work for Mac and are still developed and you can buy them and use with any app.

In Speech Central you can use also any OpenAI compatible open source server that can be installed on the Mac, which is the best solution but is more complicated than setting up Azure account. I haven't tried it myself, but considering that users that completed it aren't some exceptional experts, I assume it isn't overly complicated.

I found the SirProc voices. Some of them are quite nice. The OpenAi server solution is something someone who's already done it would have to walk me through. I'm not always such a digital klutz, but this one has me baffled.

They also have iOS voices, but I can’t fully recommend them, at least not in pair with Speech Central.

In general they have a big latency which is problematic in few use cases including in the way that Speech Central works.

However with simpler apps that don’t use some more advanced voice controls (and that is nearly any other app), this will bother you much less though it will be noticeable in some use cases (like frequent seek of the content), but at least it will work well in continuous reading.

They have reduced that latency significantly to the level that it is barely usable. However the last time I have checked was more than a year ago so it could be that they are now even better regarding that.