Using the Reader
The controls for text-to-speech are similar to those for listening to music. You can play and pause just as you would in any music player. Voice Dream Reader remembers where you leave off, and when you open the article or book again, it'll go straight to that location.
The text box that shows the text has some important capabilities. Tap anywhere and you'll enter full screen mode. Tapping again will bring back the controls at the top and bottom. By default, the app enters full screen mode a few seconds after you press Play, but you can disable auto-full screen from Advanced Settings.
While listening, you can scroll anywhere in text, either by dragging on the text or using the slider at the bottom. To get back to the highlighted text being read, tap the screen with two fingers.
You can double tap (tapping twice in quick succession) on any word, and Voice Dream Reader will start reading from that word. Another useful gesture is sentence rewind and fast forward. Swipe left with two fingers, and the reader will go backwards to the beginning of the current sentence. Two finger swipe to the right, and the reader will advance to the next sentence.
If you press on a word and hold, a menu will pop up. You can see the dictionary definition of the word by pressing "Define". If you press "Bookmark", Voice Dream Reader will create a bookmark at the beginning of the paragraph the selected word is in. Finally, if you press "Highlight", the entire sentence around the selected word will be highlighted. To remove a bookmark or a highlight, press and hold the bookmark icon on the left margin, or the highlight text bar on the right margin.
Many people prefer a distraction free screen without a lot of text. Voice Dream Reader is equipped with Focused Reading Mode. To activate, pinch the screen with two fingers, and the speech text area will be reduced to about a third of the screen in the middle. In addition, the text will be scrolled automatically so that the word and line being spoken is always in the middle. To bring back the full screen, un-pinch or expand the text area with two fingers. Keep in mind that you finger tips must start out from inside the reduced text area.
The slider at the bottom shows you where you are in the text. The time played and time left labels to the left and right of the slider are estimates based on the length of the text and the speech rate. You can drag the slider to move to a different part of the text. Again, two-finger tap to get back to the highlighted text being read.
The Bookmark button to the left lets you pull up bookmarks and highlighted sentences. If there're chapter marks in a eBook, they'll appear also. And the Search button on the right lets you do a full-text search.
When the end of an article is reached, the default behavior is to play a sound and advance to the next article on the list currently shown in the Home screen. You can change the default behavior in the Advanced Setting section in Settings. However, when you're playing from the Playlist, Voice Dream Reader will always advance to the next article regardless the setting.
Some people like to listen to a book at night before going to sleep. You can set a timer by pressing on the Play or Pause button and hold. Once you start the timer, a clock icon will show up at the bottom of the screen. The Reader will stop reading when time is up. To stop the timer, just tap on the clock icon.
The Voice Setting button at top of the Reader screen lets you change how text is spoken. You can change how fast the text is read using the Speech Rate slider. You can also change the Voice -- if you've purchased additional Voices. See the next section for more detail on how Voice Dream Reader handles languages and voices.
The Text Setting button next to it allows you to change the font, font size, and select a color theme. The Light and Dark color themes are fixed and cannot be altered. If you select the Custom color theme, you'll see controls for setting Text Color, Background Color, Spoken Word and Line Color, and Selected Text color.
The Editor button takes you to the text Editor. You can perform language translation using Google Translate there. At present, you cannot edit very large text, like an ebook, due to the memory limitation of the text editor available on the iPad or iPhone. But if you wish, you could translate text of any length even if it's too large to be displayed.
Language and Voice
Voice Dream Reader understands the concepts of Language and Voice. Language is the attribute of text, while a voice is used to read the text in that language outloud. Voices can have different regional dialects, gender and age. The app is shipped with a female American English voice, Heather. You can buy additional voices for English, or another language. This can be done from Settings or from Voice Settings.
When a new article or book is loaded in Voice Dream Reader, we automatically detect the language of the text. The first time you listen to it, we'll use the preferred voice for that language. (Preferred voice can be set in Settings.) While listening, you can pick a different voice for that language if you have more than one. Voice Dream remembers that and will use it the next time you open the article or book.
You can translate text from one language to another in the Editor. We use Google Translate; the result is the same as if you do it on the Google Website. Translation uses up translation credits, which you can buy in Settings. Each translation credit is good for translating a single article up to 5,000 characters. If your article is longer than 5,000 characters, you would need multiple translation credits. For example, if you have an article with 8,000 characters, you'll need 2 translation credits. As long as you have enough translation credits, you can translate text of any length, even a book.
Voice Dream has been designed for VoiceOver users to operate. However, some behaviors are different:
Here are some useful tips for VoiceOver users:
Voice Dream Reader can open files with the following formats:
There're two ways to open a file: from the Dropbox Browser in Voice Dream Reader, and from another app. The easiest way is to use Dropbox. Most people create a folder in Dropbox and call it "Voice Dream", for example, and put the files that they want to listen to in that folder. Then, from Voice Dream Reader, you can open the file by pushing the "+" button at the bottom of the Home screen and select Dropbox. The first time you use it, you'll be asked to allow Voice Dream Reader to access files in Dropbox.
The other way is to do it from another app. Many iPad and iPhone apps can open files: you've probably opened attachments in the Mail app. After you open the attachment, you'll see the Action button at the top. The button looks like a box with an arrow coming out of it. Click on that, click on Open In... and select Voice Dream Reader. You can do this from any app that presents content with the Open In... option, such as Good Reader and box.net.
Either way, once you open the file, Voice Dream Reader will extract text from the file and store it in its own database. You'll be able to listen to it offline, and you don't need the original file any more.
You can download eBooks from Gutenberg for free directly from Voice Dream Reader. Press the "+" button from the Home screen and select Gutenberg. Navigate to the book you want, and select the "EPUB (no image) version to the book to download.
Finally, you can download eBooks from Bookshare, if you have a Bookshare account. You'll first need to enter your user ID and password in Settings. Then, Bookshare will appear as an option when you press the "+" button.
The easiest way to listen to a Web page is to use our built-in Browser. Click on the "+" button from the Home screen, and select Web Browser. The browser will pop up, and you can type in or paste an URL. You have two options to save the Web page: "Smart Save" and "Save All". Smart Save tries to intelligently strip out the extraneous stuff on the Web page like menus and ads. Smart Save does not work on Web sites that requires you to log in and occasionally it could make mistakes. The other option is "Save All", which saves all the text that appear on the Web page and works on Web sites that require logging-in. If you like, you can use the Editor to remove the text you don't want. Save All works even if the URL points to a file, as long as the file is in a format that Voice Dream Reader can read.
You can also use a bookmarking service. If you already use Pocket (formerly Read It Later) or Instapaper, then you don't need much help here. Just enter your user ID and password in Settings, and press the Refresh button in the Home screen to download unread articles.
If you haven't used Pocket or Instapaper, read on.
An important advantage of using Pocket or Instapaper is that they allow you to "bookmark" a Web page anywhere for reading later: You can bookmark a Web page from your work computer, and later pull it up in Voice Dream Reader on your iPhone or iPad.
Starting out, we recommend Pocket, because it's free. We recommend Instapaper only if you need to access content behind a "Pay Wall", premium content like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal that requires you to log-in. Note that Instapaper requires a subscription account with monthly payments - it is their policy for third party apps to access your reading list.
For both services, Voice Dream Reader downloads "Unread" articles, and you can download the most recent 50, 100, 200, or 500 articles. If you have older articles on your device, they'll be deleted from Voice Dream Reader (not from Pocket or Instapaper).
To sign up and configure Pocket, follow the instructions below. The instructions on their Web site are a bit hard to follow.
Folders
Voice Dream Reader lets you use folders to manage your content. To see folders, click on the File Cabinet icon in the Home screen. (You can also click on the Title in the middle of the top bar). The File Cabinet first shows All Items and Playlist. If you enabled Pocket or Instapaper, it'll show those also. These are special, system folders. You cannot edit them.
You can create you own folders, like "Books" or "Junk". Press the "+" button the File Cabinet to create a folder. You can also rename folders or re-arrange them by pressing on the Edit button in the File Cabinet.
To move articles and books to a folder, you need to be in the Home screen. Press the Edit button all the way to the right, and you'll enter Edit mode. Then, you can select the items by tapping on the them, and click on the Move button to move it to your own folder. Pressing the Trash button permanently deletes the articles you selected. When you delete articles from Pocket or Instapaper, they'll be marked "Read" or "Archived" there also. This works even if you're offline; we mark these articles and tell Pocket and Instapaper about it the next time you Refresh.
A couple of neat iPad and iPhone features -- many people don't know about them -- are very handy. One, you can swipe left on an item and the Delete button will pop up on that item. Two, you can tap on the thin status bar that shows battery life at the top to scroll to the top of the list.
Playlist
Playlist is a special folder. It's special because one, you can pick any text item to include in your Playlist without moving them. Two, you can arrange the items in any order you like. Three, if you remove an item from the Playlist, it is not deleted from the device permanently: it's simply removed from the Playlist. Lastly, items in the Playlist are always played back-to-back.
Can I open a book from iBooks, Kindle or Nook? Unfortunately, these books are DRM-protect. To prevent piracy, they're encryted so other apps cannot read them. There are ways to remove DRM. But it's your decision.
My article often contain little snippets of text that don't fit with the rest of the text. Why? Most articles are formatted for visual reading. We do our best to simulate a human being reading it, but obviously we can't do nearly as well as a human being. For example, captions for photos and block quotes are difficult to put in the right place, and difficult to detect. The technology will of course improve, and we'll always use the latest and greatest.
Why are some words not pronounced correctly? Text to speech technology has improved dramatically since the days of monotone robotic voices, but it still falls short of real humans. Machines have trouble with understating meaning and context. It has trouble figuring out whether "read" should be pronounced "red" or "reed". Overtime, I'm sure technology will get better, and we'll be there to take advantage of it.
If I buy a voice, can I download it on another device? Yes, as long as the other device is linked to the same Apple ID. Just push the Restore button in the Buy Voice screen, and the voices you already paid for will be available for download free of charge.
If I buy translation credits, can I use it on another device? No. When you buy them, translation credits are added only on the device from which you made the purchase.
Why do you charge for translation while I can do it for free on the Web? We use Google translate, which is still the best machine translator in the world. Google charges other companies like Voice Dream for using their translation engine, so we need a way to recoup our cost.