I prefer to consume books/light novels by listening to them. I do it primarily on my PC via Balabolka but I got an apple device recently and tried out a few apps to be able to do it on the go.
Most had paid subscriptions and limits so they ended up being deleted.
- Speechify – setup too long, only to tell you the short/limited trial.
- Text to Speech! – ok for new/pasted text. Can’t open external files.
- Voice Aloud Reader – Would have been nice, until you hit the short daily word limit 🙁
After searching some more, I found Aloud!. Aside from some quirks, it is able to do the things I require of it.
- It has access to recent files (icloud) and open text files.
- It has some voice selections and speech rate
- It works ok with iOS’s media control/locked play. In combination to iOS’s Timer + “stop playing”, it’s possible to have it dictate you to sleep and stop (saving on phone power).
A missing feature that I require is “Search”. Moving from PC to iOS (winding down to sleep, going out of the house, etc), I’d need to find where I stopped to continue what I was listening to.
The current version works well enough for me so I’ll stick to it. Give it a try if you’re on iOS.