Hi All,
"Speak It!" is an app that lets you use the Acapela group's Infovox
voices on the iPhone or iPod Touch, and supposedly also for the iPad,
on text that you type or paste into the app, and create audio files
with these voices that you can either play back or mail. This is
absolutely great, because you can control the speed and volume of the
voices, and use voices that you may choose to purchase for other
languages. The basic app ($1.99) from Future Apps, Inc. comes with
Heather (U.S.), Graham (U.K.), Lucy (U.K.), and Ryan (U.S.). You can
buy additional voices through in-app purchase for $0.99 each. I've
just finished downloading Alice (France) through the app (took about
10 minutes to download and install). There's a text entry area (I
copied and pasted what I wanted into it instead of typing it in), and
a picker wheel at the bottom of the page to select the voice.
The screen when you start the app has two buttons at the top
("Settings" at the left and an unlabeled button for info at the
right), and three buttons at the bottom ("Speak It", "Actions", and an
unlabeled button for saved items created as a result of using the
"Actions" button). Below the top row of buttons is an area for text
entry following the label: "Enter text to say" where you can either
type in or paste in copied text. This is accessed in the usual way by
double tapping in the text area to bring up the virtual keyboard.
Below the text entry area and occupying the bottom section third or so
of the screen is picker wheel labeled "Select Voice".
You'll likely want to double tap the "Settings" button at the top left
of the screen to adjust the voice rate before you start speaking with
the Speak It! voice. There are three settings options to adjust: Text
font size (for low vision folks), Voice volume, and Voice rate. Each
control has both a button and a slider. The button doesn't do
anything except update to a number you can read off -- I think this is
words per minute in the case of the rate. When you make your
adjustments flick left to get back from your settings to the "Done
button" on the right edge (not quite at the top of the screen; maybe a
fifth of the way down from the top of the screen in the vertical
screen extent if you touch it directly) and double tap.
When you enter text, you have the option of either leaving the virtual
keyboard up, and double tapping the "Speak It!" button, which has now
moved up so it is just above the virtual keyboard and below the text
entry area, at the left side of the center of the screen, or of first
flicking right from the "Speak It!" button to the "Done" button at the
right side of the center of the screen, and double tapping to dismiss
the virtual keyboard.
The first mode is convenient when you want to review material and
continue to type in. When you've finished entering text, you'll want
to use the "Done" button to dismiss the virtual keyboard so you can
also gain access to the "Actions" button for saving items, either as
text or to create audio files, and to access the saved items (via the
unlabeled button to the right of the "Actions" button) under either
the list of "Saved Phrases" or the "Saved Audio Files". Double
tapping one of the "Saved Audio Files"
To have Speak It! read the text, double tap the "Speak It!" button at
the bottom left. Once you double tap that button, two buttons, the
left for "Play/Pause" and the right for "Stop", will appear in the
location of the "Speak It!" button. You have to move your finger
slightly to the left to double tap the "Play/Pause" button. Double
tapping the "Stop" button causes the "Play/Pause" button to disappear,
and for the area occupied by the "Play/Pause" button and "Stop" button
to be replaced with the "Speak It!" button.
As mentioned before there are two unlabeled buttons: one at the top
right and one at the bottom right corner for saved items. The button
at the top right, that you will use to purchase new in-app voices,
takes you to an Info screen where there is a Help button at the top
left that gives you information about trouble-shooting issues with
Speak It!, and where the first listed button is the "Speak It! Store"
button, which you can use to purchase additional voices. (The also
have buttons further down the list for their other applications, but
you probably don't want to leave the app to find out about these or
buy them when you're first setting up Speak It!.) The additional
Acapela group voices currently available for this app are for (U.K. or
U.S.) English, French (including a Canadian French voice), German,
Spanish (including an American Spanish voice), and Italian.
Miscellaneous other comments: Just after downloading the Alice French
voice I found VoiceOver's behavior a bit sluggish. There are various
suggestions on their FAQ (reached from "Help" button via the unlabeled
button to the "Info" page) about possibly deleting the app, shutting
down and restarting the iPhone/iPod Touch, and then downloading and
installing updates for the app through iTunes on your computer if this
happens (you will not be charged again). I didn't have to do any of
this, but I did restart my iPod Touch. There may be practical limits
on the size and number of voice recordings and saved phrase files you
can keep. I haven't used the app often enough to tell. I did notice
that when I saved longer files (130,000 words -- novella length) that
sometime buttons would simply click and not get announced when I
navigated the control pages quickly. I'd also guess that saving and
emailing lengthy audio files may also take up memory resources of the
iPhone and affect VoiceOver performance. The audio files are AIFF --
not compressed, and the default format for Macs. They'll play in
Windows iTunes, and on your iPhone, but maybe not in other Windows
apps without conversion to a compressed format. They can also get
quite large, so do some judicious experimenting on small scales before
you get carried away. Low vision users will like the ability to save
these phrases in large font text. This app is also supposed to be
universal binary and work on the iPad, too. If you have listened to
the Infovox voices from the Assistiveware page and downloaded the
trial (for the Mac) at:
http://www.assistiveware.com/ivoxsamples.php
you'll probably have a much better feeling for what these voices sound
like, particularly speeded up, than trying out the same voices at the
in-app purchase store. Some list users will also like the fact that
male English voices are available. I typically don't try to run these
voices as fast as the regular voices for the iPhone/iPod Touch. As
Brett has mentioned previously, when you set rates over 90 per cent
for the English language voices, and you don't use the default U.S.
voice, you're likely to experience some dropped bits of speech. This
is not the only app that uses the Infovox voices for text to speech.
Anne recommended the "Read 2 Me" app ($4.99) by Retinal Media. I'll
have to explore the latest update, because they have recently added
adjustable voice speed (yay!) and Google Docs importing, along with
larger file support, and appears to be less buggy. But the "Speak
It!" app has support for other language voices.
FutureApps, the developer of Speak It!, also has translation apps that
use these voices. It's possible that some of the other languages from
their iSpeak series that are demoed on their web site will also make
it into Speak It! (e.g., Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, and Polish).
Here's the FutureApps URL:
http://www.future-apps.net/
• Speak It! Text to Speech ($1.99) by FutureApps is available
internationally at the iTunes Store:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/speak-it-text-to-speech/id308629295?mt=8
Comes with 4 U.S. and U.K. English Infovox voices. Additional voices
(currently in English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish) may be
purchased for $0.99/each via in-app purchase. This app is universal
binary, and also works for the iPad.
• Read 2 Me ($4.99) by Retinal Media:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/read-2-me/id313752154?mt=8
English only Infovox voices, and also universal binary to work with
the iPad. New features of variable voice speed, Google Docs
importing, and more.
Cheers,
Esther
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