Speak4Me Text to Speech Reader

I'm an avid writer and often times I find myself in a situation which I need to read something out loud. Normally I do it myself, but today I decided to branch out. First thing I noticed in the app was the interface (I believe I used the term correctly). Layout was simple yet an understandable design. Easy to navigate and with a dark mode. Second thing I noticed was how subpar the voices were. All of them sounded completely robotic, even the "premium" ones. Compared to all the other text-to-speech services I've tried, this is by far the worst, which is really saying something. The app includes 25 languages, yet most (apart from English) only have 2-3 voices, which is absurd. Seeing how bad this is I don't understand why you feel the need to charge to use this program, especially when you're as greedy to give just 100 words as preview. Third complaint is probably how buggy this is. While attempting to use the "clone my voice" feature the app crashed multiple times, to which I gave up. Loading is also very slow and the way this app is made is extremely inefficient. It feels like this was done as a student coding project and not a functioning app. Conclusion: Don't bother.

When Speechify wanted over $200 a year I went looking for a second option. I found Speak4me and it’s a little more affordable. I have been trying out apps that I might recommend to clients with voice disorders. It’s a powerful app for those who need a voice but aren’t able to speak. I personally use it to read articles to me. It saves me time if I can read while I’m getting ready or walking. Just fyi: I do think it has a lot of room for growth, but I’m hopeful they’ll get there. It freezes frequently, the premium voices still sound pretty robotic with some pronunciation errors, and you can currently only upload files from dropbox or iCloud. In Speechify you can upload files directly into it from Canvas, but you can’t do that with Speak4me. This would be a game changing feature! They say updates on these are coming soon, but they’ve been saying that for 3 months now.

I had a trach placed and couldn’t speak for many days, and even when I started speaking sometimes I needed assistance communicating. This app was a godsend for me. I was able to easily and relatively quickly communicate with my nurses, doctors, care team and family far better than trying to write everything down. My nurses loved being able to communicate with me and me to be able to communicate with them so easily and all asked what the app was. This was a great purchase while I needed it, very functional and if I end up needing help like this again this is the app I’ll run to. 10/10 would recommend this app.