Our rating: By: Linguatec Version #: 2.2.0 Date Released: 2011-08-03 Developer: Price: 1.99 User Rating: Loading... Loading... Download App

Voice Reader is an app that reads text documents and speaks them out loud in a variety of voices and languages. If you’re the kind of ambitious person who attempts to use their iPhone for reading books and work documents you’ll be more than aware that it can be an eye-straining process. By reading out loud to you, Voice Reader overcomes this problem.

The app gives you access to 32 voices in 21 foreign languages, which can be purchased separately. Alternatively, there is a whole bunch of international ‘online voices’ that you can access for free if you have a WiFi internet connection. As well as being generally useful, some fun can be had making foreign voices speak English phrases; I particularly recommend the Dutch.

Aside from reading out text documents and whatever you type into it, Voice Reader has plenty of options and customisability. You can save all your audio and text files on your iPhone, or you can send them straight away to an e-mail address.

The options to tweak the speed and pitch of the reading voice is also a nice touch, though I confess that I mainly played around with it to create the most strange and distorted voice possible; some of the vocal mutations I came up with were actually quite disturbing.

The only complaint I can make against this app is the interface, which is unflexible to the point of not being able to navigate your way back to the home page of the app. If, for instance, you just typed and saved an audio/text file, you can’t then return to the main page to open it, or anything else in the app for that matter. Hopefully this issue gets amended soon.

While the voices available perhaps lack the character to read out a novel to you, they’re useful if you need to remember things for an exam, want your work reports read out to you, or want to quickly find out how to say things in a foreign language. Also, if like me you have nothing better to do, then manipulating the voices to sound utterly inhuman is genuinely entertaining. The diverse uses of Voice Reader make it an app that most people will find handy, or at least fun.