Voicepaper: PDF, eBooks & News

Voicepaper is a critical part of my daily workflow. I try to keep up on all the news and blogs I can so that I can share what’s most valuable with my community, but I don’t want to spend my time reading a screen. Voicepaper reads to me while I’m driving or showering. The integration with Pocket is smooth, the interface is decent, and the text-to-speech is highly accurate.

The document I had from Evernote is mainly Chinese, but starts out with English. So the app automatically choose English and never changes to Chinese, thus skipping over the content. Edit: So as the developer mentioned, the problem I previously talked about no longer exist. My problem now is that this app is so slow. I don’t know what happened, but when I first used it, the speed was the same as the first version. Now the time it takes to download a document from Evernote can take more than 4 mins. These are the same documents I downloaded onto the first Voicepaper app, so it isn’t my internet. Secondly, if I am skipping sections inside a document, the app takes about a min to process my command and play the section I want. Why is this “improved” version less functional then the old one?! The thing is, I feel pretty much forced to use this app. I previously used Voicepaper 1, which was great even if it didn’t have the organization features of this version. I paid to use Chinese on it — a one time fee. Okay, so I understand why Voicepaper 2 costs more. But that cost....to avoid it, I even stopped updating my iOS so I can continue using the first one. Unfortunately, I must have accidentally gave permission to update. This app is the only one out there that does exactly what I need, which is why I am now going to pay to use it. However, if I had another option that was cheaper, even if it had less features (as long as there is Chinese), I would probably switch in a heartbeat.

I used to have the Lisgo text to voice app and I loved it. It was easy to use after I contacted the developer to find out the mysterious secret about how to get items from Pocket to Lisgo. The Lisgo app recommended Voicepaper because of a needed upgrade. I think the Lisgo developer might be the Voicepaper developer? Voicepaper is completely non-intuitive for me. It splits one article into many sections so that your list of articles becomes huge. But there is no search feature that I could find to help me wade through the articles I have collected over the years from Pocket. It appears they want me to create my own playlists. That’s okay if you start from nothing. But I had a huge collection of articles already from Lisgo/Pocket and Pocket was organized through the MyList/Archive feature to allow easier control over what showed up in Lisgo. In my opinion, the video instructions for Voicepaper do not take you step by step in a clear manner. Everything in my Voicepaper is now a mess. Pulling articles from Pocket is not clear. I am very discouraged and sad. I used to put on Lisgo and listen for hours while I worked or rested. My response to this mess was to sign up for Audible Books. I LOVE Audible and they offer a free newspaper with the subscription. But I still miss Lisgo.