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@Voice Aloud Reader - Android app - reads aloud text from web pages, news articles, long emails, sms, PDF files, eBooks and more.
IMPORTANT: You need Text-To-Speech engine and voices installed on your device to use this app. If you don't have it yet, pickup from Play Store. Examples: Speech Services by Google (pre-installed on most Android devices), Vocalizer TTS, Acapela TTS, Cereproc, RHVoice TTS and more. You may use more than one if you want.
@Voice Premium License removes all ads from the main @Voice Aloud Reader app and enables a few premium features. It can be purchased from Google Play Store. However if you need this license on a device where Play Store is not available, or for any other reasons prefer to order directly from us, click the above link. The Premium License is permanent and can be used on any Android device or emulator. After placing the order, your license key will arrive by email from sales@hyperionics.com - please make sure to unblock this address in your SPAM filters.
Downloads and Manual:
NOTE:
@Voice Add to List desktop browser extension that works through a Dropbox account (even a free account they offer) is available now. Read more here.
* Click "Share", "Send by Email" button or menu item in any app to send text
you read to @Voice Aloud Reader for aloud reading over speakers or headset.
* If "Share" is not available, copy text in other apps and paste it into @Voice
for aloud reading.
* Open text, PDF, DOC, EPUB/MOBI/FB2 or HTML files from Android file system for reading aloud.
* Save articles opened in @Voice to files for later listening. Construct
listening lists of many articles for uninterrupted listening one after the
other. Order the list as needed, e.g. more important articles first.
* Record spoken articles to sound files - WAV
(uncompressed) or OGG (compressed) formats supported.
* Use Android local Text-to-speech voices, or if you want - cloud voices from
Google (WaveNet), Amazon (Polly TTS) or Microsoft (Azure TTS). Note that the
cloud voices are paid services by Google, Amazon or Microsoft, respectively,
although each of them offers some free usage monthly.
* Switch voices or even languages with the special annotation
in the text. Read more at:
https://hyperionics.com/atVoice/VoiceChanges.html
* Easily control speech generator volume, pitch and rate of speech.
* Pause/resume speech as needed with wired or Bluetooth headset buttons, plus
click Next/Previous buttons to jump by sentence, long-click to switch to the
next/previous article on a list.
* Can automatically recognize the language of an article and use appropriate TTS
voice, if available, or set your preferred voices manually with "Select
language" menu item.
* Options for additional pause between paragraph, start talking as soon as a new
article is loaded or wait for a button press, start/stop talking when wired
headset plug is inserted/removed.
* Optional sleep timer to stop speech after a given timeout.
ABOUT PERMISSIONS:
The full Internet access is needed because the “Share” function from web
browsers and any news reading apps I tried, sends us only the URL address
(http://something...). They do not send the full text of articles, so @Voice has
to download the article from the Internet to be able to read it aloud or save
for later reading. Only by using Copy text function in one app, and pasting it
in @Voice, or by saving the full text in one app to storage and opening a file
in @Voice, you could avoid Internet connection, but this is not very convenient.
PLEASE send me your suggestions for improvements and bug reports welcome - send them to the email address listed on "Contact" page. Thanks and have fun! And a BIG THANK YOU! to Ilia Prokator for sending me the idea for this app.
Greg at Hyperionics
* Under the "Page look" button on top (T+/- icon), MODE tab, added an option to force e-ink mode. It is available when you switch the app into the horizontal scrolling mode. This mode avoids page change animation and flashes the page with black and white to minimize e-ink "ghosting". It also changes the color scheme of the icons and buttons for better contrast.
* Important stability and performance improvements.
* Avoiding animation when changing pages on e-ink screens and flashing screen
between pages to minimice ghosting.
* Added Korean translations of the app's screens, menus etc.
* Stability and performance improvements.
* Changed the way to select target folder for Record sound file function, to
the internal file browser of @Voice - makes it possible to navigate e.g. to host
shared folders under BlueStacks Android emulator.
* Added Japanese and Indonesian translations of the app's screens, menus etc.
* Removed "Add from Pocket" and related functions from the Reading list menu, as
Pocket is shutting down.
* Stability and performance improvements.
* New Replace function added to "Edit text"
* Improved website filtering
* Fixed opening some FB2 files, which previously failed
*Other important stability and performance improvements
* Important stability and performance improvements
* Fix: edit text function, when started in dark mode, had black letters on
black background.
* Important stability and performance improvements
* Added fast scroll bar to the "Edit speech" screen, as some users define
close to 2000 speech replacements.
* Fix: start talking at once option did not work correctly after a new article
or book chapter was loaded.
* Important stability and performance improvements.
* More fixes to translation mode, it did not work correctly when e.g. the
@Voice app was swiped off the screen or exited with Back button and restored,
and similar situations.
* Other important stability and performance improvements.
* Better filtering of some very long web pages, that load in parts into
@Voice app to avoid memory overflow errors.
* Translations still failed in some situations or did not show an obvious way of
adding new languages, fixed.
* Other important stability and performance improvements.
* Better filtering of some very long web pages, that load in parts into @Voice app to avoid memory overflow errors.
* More improvements to the Translate function, and it's now available as one
push button on top. Try it out. Also look what's new under the Settings icon
(gear graphics), after you pressed the Translate button.
* Decoding "Zalgo" monster speech, used in some fantasy novels, so that it could
be read aloud. Also lowered the Zalgo text pitch by 50% to give a clue that a
monster is speaking.
* Stability and performance improvements.
* Translate function on the "Reload or clear" menu (circular arrows button on
top) is much more reliable now. If you are learning foreign languages, after
translating text try also the "Bilingual text" option on that menu, and listen.
* Backup/Restore @Voice folder functions now preserve the file date/times -
important if sorting lists by time
* Stability and performance improvements.
* Stability and performance improvements.
* Translations work better and faster now
* Better handling of <iframes> inside downloaded MHTML files
* Fix: HTML <pre> text passages were not read correctly, when paragraphs were
separated with empty lines.
* Continuing the on-going struggle to find and eliminate the bad banner ads or ad sources, that crash
the app occasionally.
* Website filters can now contain some speech replacement, e.g. to still show
in the text emojis, or reference links, but not read them aloud.
* Still trying to find and eliminate the bad banner ads or ad sources, that crash
the app occasionally.
* Added support for Amazon Polly "generative" and "long-form" voices.
* Work to eliminate app crashes caused by some banner ads
* Stability and performance improvements.
* Improvements to how Math tags are either read or ignored when reading
aloud.
* Stability and performance improvements.
* Stability and performance improvements.
* Added search boxes to the language and voice selectors on "Change voice or
language" screen.
* Stability and performance improvements.
* Now opens also .txtz files
* Improved link sharing from @Voice to other apps
* Stability and performance improvements.
* Stability and performance improvements.
* Detects on many pages that offer an online view of a PDF file, and offers
to download that file for local reading aloud
* Stability and performance improvements.
* Stability and performance improvements
* Website filtering improvements
* Stability and performance improvements
* The app is now supported only on Android v8 (Oreo) and higher. Sorry, due
to some software components incompatibility can no longer support older versions
of the system.
* Website filtering improvements
* Stability and performance improvements
* Important bug fix, the online configuration was not read in some
situations.
* The "Monitor Download folder..." function, if enabled to add dowloaded
pages to the reading list, will now move the files from Download directory to
the directory assigned to the current reading list.
* RegExp matching in text processing filters (edf, edp) is now set to SINGLELINE
mode (or DOTALL) for more flexible matches across mutliple lines of text.
* Website filtering improvements
* Performance and memory saving improvements
* Website filtering improvements.
* Updated some translations.
* Updated some translations and minor filtering improvements.
* Improvements to web page text filtering, reporting bad filters and following links within @Voice app.
* Stability and performance improvements
* More improvements to website text filtering and serial download
* Improvements to website text filtering and serial download
* New function under the "Reload or clear" menu (circular arrows button):
"Refresh config", to instantly refresh the app online configuration and
website filters.
By default the check for updates of config is every 1 hour.
* A message asking the user to review the text newly extracted from a
web-page and email us if something is wrong, is pre-pended to the output shown
in @Voice, but not read aloud. It can be easily hidden and there is a setting to
stop showing it, if ennoying. Hopefully will let us improve text filtration for
many websites.
* If the app is switched into full screen reading mode, which sometimes may
happen accidentally after long-pressing the round button at the bottom-right, a
short instruction is shown on how to use this feature and go back to normal
mode. An option is provided to supporess this message, or it will stop showing
after being viewed 3 times.
* Stability and performance improvements.
* Stability and performance improvements
* Stability and performance improvements
* Important fixes to downloading pages while following Next links.
* Stability and performance improvements
* Small fix for pages that refuse to load, because they contain unknow URL links, e.g. some Facebook pages have fb://... links. The app is now blocking a try to download such link, so that the rest of the page could load normally.
* Faster processing of some long HTML files
* When you share or paste a web link to @Voice, it automatically recognizes
if the page has "Next" links and proposes to download the following pages (or
"chapters") into one EPUB file. Such "serial" download may be stopped at
anytime, preserving the parts downloaded before pressing STOP.
* Better handling of user interface in right to left reading order languages,
e.g. in Arabic.
* Stability and performance improvements
* Small change to adjust how long HTML files are handled, if their length comes mostly from inline encoded images.
* Turned off the page curl effect by default in paginated reading mode, as it
caused problems on some devices. If you like it and it works well for you, you
may turn it back on under T+/- button on top - MODE tab.
* Stability improvements.
* Lowering volume of full screen ads, if they play with sound, to barely
audible. If you want, you may raise the volume with the volume rocker on the
device. After the ad is dismissed, the original volume is restored.
* Stability improvements.
* Added page flipping and curling effect, when switching pages in paginated reading mode. If you want, turn it off under the T+/- button on top - MODE tab.
* Stability and performance improvements
* Better handling of ZIP files
* Fix for chats exported from new versions of
WhatsApp.
* Added ability to send a multiple file selection from file browser apps to
@Voice Add to List
* Fixed "send Next (or Previous) button to set bookmark" function, it was not
working well for some files.
* Stability and text appearance improvements.
* In the "Edit speech" function for RegEx replacements, RegExp capture groups
like $1, $2 could be used in the replacement string. Now the syntax is extended
to also use notation like $?1, $?2 etc. If the group with the number given after
$? was NOT captured, the replacement string will be cut off at that place. This
offers better flexibility for constructing special purpose replacements, e.g.
adding SSML code to pause after each word, but not after HTML tags or inside of
them.
* Small improvement for foldable fonts, when 2 column layout is selected for
"landscape only" orientation
* Better text extraction from some web novel sites.
* Small change to enable JSON filters to edit text of loaded files, e.g.
remove unwanted content.
* Stability and performance improvements
* Updated some translations
* Stability and performance improvements
* Small fix to make easier entering the correct endpoing for Microsoft Azure TTS service
* Fix for Pocket sync problem, when user has thousands of archived articles on Pocket server.
* When dialog voice changes are enabled and you want to define the voices
that will be used in dialogs, you may now define an arbitrary name of a group of
voices. It will be saved, and later, e.g. for a different ebook, you may
re-use the same voice group by selecting its name.
* Speech replacements, defined under Settings - Edit speech, can be now
synchronized between devices too.
* Added optional synchronization between devices of the speech replacements (defined under Settings menu - Edit speech). The replacements changes made on other devices are imported only when the app starts or when you enter the "Edit speech" screen.
* "Add from Dropbox" function on the Reading List screen menu, together with
a new "@Voice Add to List" Chrome browser plugin. Read more and download here.
* Sync of reading progress and bookmarks via Dropbox is now
available. Enable under the Settings menu - Sync between devices. If you don't
have a Dropbox account, you may create a free one at dropbox.com.
* No extra plugin app is needed now for Sync to work, it's all handled in the
main @Voice app.
* Fixed "Sync articles with Pocket" function on the reading list menu, it
recently stopped working due to some changes on Pocket servers.
* Beta test of sync of reading progress and bookmarks via Dropbox is now available. Enable under the Settings menu - Sync between devices. If you don't have a Dropbox account, you may create a free one at dropbox.com
* Stability and performance improvements
* Due to changes in Google Drive security policies, synchronization of
reading between devices no longer works. I'm working on an alternative synch
method, this version udates sync setup screens to display this info and disable
sync, prompts to uninstall the defunct @Voice Sync Plugin app.
* Other important functionality and stability improvements
* Stability and performance improvements
* Fix: on Edit speech screen, after pressing "Export speech files", the button to select folder for exported files was not visible.
* Long press on the Paste Text button or menu function will show a prompt, if
the "plain text" or HTML code should be pasted, for rare cases when the original
app, from which the text was copied, places both formats in the clipboard
buffer.
* The "Encoding" menu item was removed from the "Reload or clear" menu (under
the button with circular arrows button). It seems no longer needed and actually
stopped working. Please let me know if you need it for something, and if you do,
send me the original link or file on which the encoding choice was necessary.
* Other small stability and performance improvements.
* Semi-automatic work-around for loading pages that want you to verify that "you are human" - use Chrome (or similar) browser's Save function, and @Voice will automatically add them to the reading list, or read aloud at once. Enable under the Settings menu.
* Fix problems with text search on some long files.
* Fix some small problems when loading a next chapter of an ebook, when the
current one was translated.
* Disable Translate function when font "Boldify" or dialog changes are turned on
(it does not work correctly in these situations)
* Under the Settings menu - Share icons, text and reading lists, added option
to either open links you press in @Voice app, or in your default web browser
* Other stability and performance improvements.
* Fix crash on "Dialog voice changes" screen, when "Use current" definition was chosen, and the definiton that was for current article only was to be applied to the current reading list.
* New feature - long press on a link in @Voice will select the whole link
text and copy or share the link http address.
* Fix search to the next part of long text or ebook chapter world terminate
search mode.
* Fix again the problem with the option to prefer horizontal reading mode in Japanese
after the app restart.
* If while using automatic voice changes you want to switch
voices (e.g. in a book dialog a man speaks with a female voice, and a woman with
male) - just press the "Back" button on the screen or your headset.
* Fix block of Play/Pause button after some full screen ads
* Fix horizontal scrolling in Japanese vertical reading mode.
* Fix: copying Japanese text should not include ruby markup.
* Fix problem with the option to prefer horizontal reading mode in Japanese
after the app restart.
* Fix problems with loading full page content when the Internet connection was
down.
* New experimental feature - automatic voice changes when reading book or
story dialogues. Enable and setup on the expanded bottom control panel.
* Added DeepL Translator to "Dictionaries" that can be set up after selecting
some text.
* Stability and performance improvements.
* Added "Boldify" feature to show part of words in bold font, which helps
read faster, at least to some people. Turn on/off under T+/- button on top -
FONT tab
* Other stability and performance improvements.
* Fix: sometimes web articles's title was incorrect
* Fix: some web pages loaded incorrectly
* Stability and performance improvements
* Fix problem with right-to-left text displaying incorrectly for some
websites
* Fix incorrect language recognition in some HTML and ebook texts
* Fix the problem with freshly set bookmarks not being saved in some situations.
* Other stability and performance improvements.
* Stability and performance improvements.
* Voice filter changes work also for HTML pages (e.g. web novels), not only
ebooks.
* Stability and performance improvements.
* Code changes make possible creation of filters for automatic voice changes
for book dialogs. At this time it's a manual process of creating JSON files with
RegEx expressions. Not sure if if creating user interface for it is possible.
Email author if you'd like to try this.
* Stability and performance improvements.
* Small change necessary for voice change filter for ebook dialogs to work.
* Fix: after switching from full screen mode to regular, part of the top toolbar was hidden behind the Android status bar.
* Corrections to Arabic text extraction from PDF files
* Fix saving translated ebook chapters.
* Other important quality improvements, better filtering of content for some
sites.
* Fix speech test buttons not working on the Edit Speech screen.
* Prevent several crashes, mainly in C/C++ code, while reading damaged MHTML
files and Word files.
* Updated Jsoup to 1.17.2-SNAPSHOT
* Translate menu under circular arrows button has a new option to show
bi-lingual text, each sentence in original and translated language. The app will
read it with correct voices. Useful when learning languages.
* Voice changes instructions now work in the free version too.
* Improved export of reading list to EPUB, original PDF view and more.
* Improved original PDF view, show/hide toolbars with short vertical swipes near the top or bottom of screen, auto-hides toolbars in landscape mode.
* Function List to EPUB on the reading list's menu has now an option to
create an epub file from all the articles on the list, or only from the selected
articles. This choice is shown when the reading list has visible check-boxes
next to each article title to select/de-select articles.
* The List to EPUB function now creates better EPUB files, compatible with many
other ebook readers, although the articles may not look so well, or occasionally
break the readers, if the HTML code on the saved articles is not compatible with
EPUB format specification, which is much more limited than the general HTML
format for web pages.
* The Translate menu on the "Reload or clear" button (circular arrows on top)
has a new option to load a bi-lingual text - each sentence is loaded in the
original and translated languages. The order of original - translated can be
reversed. Voice change annotations are added to read aloud each sentence with a
correct voice for their respective languages, but the app will read with voice
changes only if you have @Voice Premium License (paid license to remove ads and
enable advanced features)
* Text editing filters are now applied also to ebook chapters.
* After swiping away the media style notification, it does not come back by itself. You must start speech in @Voice app with the Play button, or start it with a headset button, to get that notification again.
* Added "finish" command to voice change instructions.
* Fix multiple inconsistencies in text search mode.
* In Translate mode, Google Translation Widget was disappearing for some pages
or books, when the "Preserve original styles" option was on.
* With android auto plugin, handles hardware media buttons Next and Previous on
the car console. Requires also AvarAuto Plugin ver. 1.6 or newer.
* Fix: on the ebook details screen, in landscape orientation, the Read and Return buttons where not active.
* Added WorldWeb Audio dictionary to supported dictionaries.
* Relaxed network timeout for TTS, allowing to set it to as low as 1 second,
or 0 to use default settings.
* Added retry count parameter for network voices. Now can be
set to anything between 1 and 10, or 0 to use the default settings.
* Reading list screen has an option to show article titles truncated at the
first vertical bar.
* Stability and performance improvements.
* Text search in case insensitive mode uses now the native search of WebView
control/Google Chrome, which has relaxed rules to find e.g. some Arabic words
written with or without extra diacritic marks.
* Enabled media style notifications on older versions of Android, down to 5.1.
Change the style under the T+/- button on top - MODE tab.
* Export of edit speech files uses first the app file interface, press folder
with cloud icon if system interface needed
* Stability improvements
* New media style notification on Android 13 and higher, stays on top of
other notifications if app is playing, can be swiped away, prettier. Option to
use old style notification is under T+/- button on top - MODE tab.
* Fix item duplication on the reading list problem, when batch-adding many files
at once.
* Other important stability and performance improvements