i Speak It for Mac and iPhone Text to Speech

i Speak It by Zapptek

I wish I were a Mac User - but I am locked into our Windows PC world in our school districts. As I have been exploring the text to speech options within the iPhone world, I have been getting great tips from readers. The i Speak It app from Zapptek looks promising - if you own a MAC.

It converts files to audio and then is a companion to your iPhone or iTouch. It converts Word docs, PDF, Pages, RTF, Appleworks, Text files and HTML files. It converts those to Mp3/AAC track files through iTunes so you get the text as a lyric as you listen, to follow along on screen (that's what it says...dunno exactly how that works).

Sounds pretty cool - but I can't test it on my PC. If anyone has it, let us know what you think.

All the best to you!
Lon

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iPhones, Kindles, E-Books and Text to Speech Readers

The VOD app for the iPhone by CYPAC can read DAISY 2.02 files.

I have been playing with my iPhone lately and I have been teased and tempted, but just can't come up with a combination of apps that works to hear books directly from text. I have purchased several apps and tried to find a work-around to get text files to read. I downloaded the Beverly Cleary Book "Ribsy" powered by Iceberg. I bought if off iTunes for $3.99. In a description on iTunes it seemed that you might be able to copy and paste sections of the text into a notes section and then copy those to another app to hear them read, but that feature had been turned off by publishers for copyright reasons in the book I bought. I had hoped to paste sections into my Speak it! app and then hear it read back. The only thing I could do was type a note attached to a paragraph and then copy the note I wrote to hear it back. All the text was locked. I discovered that the Iceberg Reader has a kids division with young children's literature.

The Iceberg Reader for kids was reviewed by The iPhone Mom. She reviewed a Curious George title that has the illustrations and actually reads the page as an audio book. You can pause and play, flip pages and bookmark favorites. This is the closest I have found to doing what I would like to do with a book on the iPhone. Good job Iceberg Reader.

I added an app, TouchReader, thinking that might let me add a public domain text to my iPhone and have it read, but even though it is a great app for getting text files onto your iPhone, changing the text size and black on white vs white on black, the text is locked and you can't copy and paste it anywhere else.

I was reading a review of the Kindle 2 and it dealt with how the text to speech setting was hampered and left up to the publishers whether to make it accessible or not. Amazon didn't feel it was competitive with the publisher's audio versions, but the publishers felt otherwise.

The issue is the same on the iPhone - there are copyright issues stopping the accessibility. As one commenter put it, "If I could read a real book or afford audio books of all my books, I would rather, but I am stuck with listening to a mechanical voice read books to me. How can that be a threat to the publishers that want to sell audio books?"

I am still exploring options. I had a reader email me recently about VOD, Voice of DAISY, which is a $12.99 app that only plays older DAISY 2.02 files. If you already have DAISY 2.02 files, you can read them on the iPhone or iTouch. It looked pretty slick, but I couldn't find any links to it on DAISY Consortium. I had to go directly to the Japanese company CYPAC that made it to find it.

If you come up with any solutions or new discoveries please keep me posted and I will share them here. Thanks to all the great readers who have been sending me questions and tips lately. It makes this blog more dynamic as we share together.

All the best to you!

Lon

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Creating and Playing Texts as Audiobooks on the iPhone

I had a really good question on email from a reader concerning text reading on an iTouch or iPhone. The question was whether you could take Bookshare Books and have them read on your iPhone or iTouch.

First off, remember that Bookshare files can't be shared. If you want to "play" a file to read, there is the Read Outloud player on Bookshare from Don Johnston that is free with your membership. This will let you hear the book on your computer.

If you want to put the text on your iPhone to read it visually - no text to speech, the app, "Touch Text Reader" is great (for .99 cents). I can upload text files right off my laptop wirelessly into my iPhone without syncing it with a little tool you get online and put on your computer. When you buy the app they give you the link where to get it free. Touch Text Reader opens .txt and.rtf and html docs.but it doesn't let you copy any of the files into a text to speech app. My "Speak it!" app will say anything I paste in - see below for more on Speak it!

Bookshare books come in different formats. You have a .txt file format and an html format. Either of those should be possible to read with an iTouch or iPhone, it just takes a little more work around to get it on there.

I have a text reader app I downloaded on my iPhone called Speak it! I can copy and paste the text from a website in it and it will read it. The thing is that it has to be text in bite-sized chunks - not large files. You have to paste in sections and listen to them. A way around that is to convert chapters of a book to Mp3 and load them in your iTunes and listen. I do that quite a few different ways. Narrator, an iPhone app, will read a list of public domain books they have prepared from the iPhone, but in order to hear a book, you have to download it to read. It can't import any text files or other books to read. In order to hear a text you have you would have to download the text from the book in an email or on a closed web page you use for that purpose ( see blog, My Reading Chair for a sample of how I took a public domain book and put it on this site and had it convert to an audio file online to listen to or download) and then open it in the iPhone browser and then paste into Speak it! I would be hesitant to post chapters even on a closed site with a Bookshare file for copyright reasons.
There aren't any quick apps to buy for your iPhone or iTouch that read text files with synthesized speech in one easy step right now. If it were me wanting to get a Bookshare title onto my iPhone to hear, I would be converting my text file to an Mp3 file by chapter and then uploading them in iTune and listening. Check out DSpeech by Dimios Tools. It is free and will convert any .txt text you paste in to an Mp3 file.

Note: Touch Text Reader, Narrator and Speak it! are all in the apps store at iTunes. Good luck to all you techie ebook folks out there. If anybody has found an easy solution to this let us know!

All the best,

Lon

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