Do they make an App that reads to you?

[jwckauman]

I want an app that reads to me. Whatever I have up on the screen, I want to hit a button and have it read it back to me. This is so I can listen to blogs while I run. Do they make anything like that?

 

[Alienhead95]

Yes they do. They have been in the store for a while now. I use share to speech, **** there are a couple more (read aloud I think).

 

[Kevin Rush]

Neither of those show up in the store. Do you have the names wrong?

 

[Alienhead95]

I would blame the windows phone store search engine for that. Here are the links
Share to Speech Lite | Windows Phone Apps+Games Store (United States)
ReadAloud | Windows Phone Apps+Games Store (United States)

Neither of those show up in the store. Do you have the names wrong?

 

[Kevin Rush]

I would blame the windows phone store search engine for that. Here are the links
Share to Speech Lite | Windows Phone Apps+Games Store (United States)
ReadAloud | Windows Phone Apps+Games Store (United States)

Thank you for the links. The store says they both are not compatible with my phone (Lumia 822 with WP 8.0 os).

 

[Alienhead95]

Oh I am sorry, I assumed you have 8.1. These apps require do 8.1

Thank you for the links. The store says they both are not compatible with my phone (Lumia 822 with WP 8.0 os).

 

[Kevin Rush]

Oh I am sorry, I assumed you have 8.1. These apps require do 8.1

No worries. SoundGecko reads the news to me on my phone very nicely. I was just interested in trying out other apps to compare.

 

[baichibird]

I know one app that can read its news to you ,but not the blogs.The NBC news.

 

[KatkaV]

Surfy browser has a feature 'listen to page' which can read any web page and in most languages. Its free. More info here.

 

[Joe920]

Ugh, SoundGecko is shutting down. Now I really hope we'll be able to ask Cortana to read things to us. Have any new good text to speech apps shown up, preferably with some kind of 'share to' function that also works from a desktop browser?

 

[labsii]

As the author of the Share to Speech app, I can tell you that it is unlikely that SoundGecko like app will appear. As you are probably aware, it was not withdrawn from the Windows Phone Store, but from all platforms.

If you quote their service provider NeoSpeech (or any other good service like Ivona), you will see that it is pretty expensive game to offer such service. They offered too much for free and it didn't make sense for them to continue (my guess, official reason is that they want to focus on Omny Radio, but why would they shut down their service if it was making money for them as long as it worked, and especially for the app that has less than 10 downloads per day on Android).

So, it is likely that every app that appears (well not just for WP but for every phone out there) will have to use phone's speech engine, which is probably better on WP than on other platforms. But there comes another catch. If you want the screen to be off during the speech, you have to implement the background player. So you are limited to something like 20 MB of memory, and the speech is memory intensive, so things become tricky. And then the background player is completely different app from UI app, and as in the speech changes happen quickly, it turns into the nightmare to sync them. All in all no one implemented that till now except me, and from financial side I think it has not paid off, but it was still an interesting effort.

Things that you can realistically expect - no new cloud speech apps, maybe some app with background player, and more likely just some new apps that use local engine with screen on (which is pretty easy to make and it is strange there aren't more of them).

 

[Joe920]

As the author of the Share to Speech app, I can tell you that it is unlikely that SoundGecko like app will appear.

And for that reason I'm thankful you developed Share2Speech!



I agree that the NeoSpeech pricing looks crazy. They should probably offer some kind of low cost mobile access deal. Right now they're just not getting any money, being way too expensive for the typical mobile user (and developer).



I have some hope (but not for you of course ) that MS will offer Cortana cloud TTS API's. Seems like a no brainer, but I haven't heard any movement on that front.