12-12-2016 , 06:52 PM
ReadAloud Review
ReadAloud is a very powerful text-to-speech app which can read aloud web pages, news, documents, books or your own custom content.
Features Details:
Clean and user-friendly UI
Support many file format (EPUB, PDF, DOCX, DOC, TXT) to read from
Can extract the content from any webpage to read for reading
Monitors the clipboard for easy sharing
Customizable fonts, size and custom color scheme in the reader
Clear voice quality and custom pitch and speed
Pronunciation editor for correct pronunciation of certain words
Sentence highlighting with auto-scroll feature
Multilanguage support
Product Details:
Company: Optimilia Studios
Platform Supported: Windows 8.1 or higher (for both PC and mobile)
Size: 30 MB
Download: Available on Windows Store
Review:
ReadAloud is a text-to speech editor for Windows platform where you can allow it to read document, website or custom text to you and that too in your own language. It takes the windows own text-to-speech engine to speak out. So you should have that feature installed on your pc and if you want to change the language to speak then you can find the related article here
So, coming to the app, it is nicely designed with very simple and uncluttered looks. The main screen i.e. Home screen is divided into two different panes “Start” where you can choose a way to start reading new content and “Recent” where the recently read items are listed to quick start the last unfinished one.
In “Start” section, again you have three different ways to start reading. With “Blank” page option, you can write/paste your own custom content on the page and start reading it for you.
And, if you want to directly read some page from a given URL then choose “Web” and paste your url to start.
While in the third case, “File” you can choose a file from your storage and starts reading. Currently ReadAloud can open and read content from the following types
And then comes the Pinned tab where you can get all the documents that you have pin. If you often open certain file/page with ReadAloud then you can pinned them to access easily later. It is like bookmarking a file/page (not its content).
Then we have settings where you can customise the Recent List size and other option like Tip of the day.
To grab the content directly from your copied, ReadAloud also monitors your clipboard for new content and gives you notification to read with the app the copied content.
One cool feature in the Settings tab is that from Edge Browser you can directly share the current webpage to ReadAloud to read that page for you.
Now, let’s go to the reader (where it speaks) which have bunch of options to customise from
First, if you open current reading content so often then you can pin to read it later. Then you have option to choose your language in which you want ReadAloud to speak that content. You have option to customise your fonts and text size and even color schemes for background and highlighted line which suites you. With the next volume control button, you can tweak the pitch, volume and rate of speech. After this you have bunch of options to control the speech (play/stop/next line). The last option is to choose the sentence where you want ReadAloud to start the reading so if you want to skip the part then use this to go to the desired line in the current page.
In the end, we have other tabs which are
Store – As you may have already find it very featured and useful from the above review then you can buy it from the windows store.
Help – This tab contains a sample doc to read and common FAQ to solve your queries.
About – This contains info and details about the developers of this app. And the changelog of the app to check for the new fixes and features added to the app.
Feedback – This will open up the Microsoft feedback hub app to give the feedback.
************* This app is available for both Windows 10 or windows 8.1 for desktops and Windows 8.1/10 for mobiles*************