ElevenReader: Read Books Aloud

At first I was sad that such a wonderful and free app got locked behind a paywall. However, my sadness was short-lived as I understand noting is actually free and this company DESERVES compensation for their wonderful serviceS! …and then I saw the subscription prices and my short-lived sadness was replaced with anger. The prices were outrageous and made this app unaffordable for lower-income book lovers who like to read a lot. Then the app was suddenly free again while they reworked the plans and a few weeks later a new, much more affordable, subscription plan came out. I especially appreciate the unlimited monthly tier so you don’t have to worry about minutes and you only have to pay when you are on a book reading binge! Some months I’m in a slump or too busy and don’t read at all. Please keep the prices reasonable, always have an unlimited tier, and keep up the good work! This truly is the best book-to-speech app out there and does miracles for those who love to read but have challenging disabilities that make it difficult. In addition, so many books (especially indie and self-published books) don’t have an audiobook version so this not only helps those with disabilities but also helps indie and self-published authors as well. Thank you for listening to feedback and thank you for this wonderful app! <3

This is quite a surprising model and probably the best I’ve tried. I often use it to read back my own work while writing. It’s a fantastic way to hear pace, cadence, etc, while also a really great way to find typos that aren’t misspellings. I do wish it handled em —dashes—. As it stands, anything inside an em dash is all compressed together into one single word. Which, isn’t very helpful and suddenly breaks the rhythm. Heck, I’d be okay if it simply treated em dashes as parenthetical. Also, sometimes the model will see the context of a character’s speech and punctuation, (eg: he shouted, “blah!” And the model reads it louder ) but often it ignores what the text is indicating. What would be even more helped if the model could for of scan the text around dialogue and try to infer what the dialogue should sound like, which is a big ask… short of that, if I could select some text (dialogue or otherwise) and have 4 or 5 options indicating how is should be read (eg. Quiet, thoughtful, concerned, scared, alarmed, sinister, etc) but only for that selection. Because the next paragraph might not need that inflection. Otherwise, this is a very cool tool. Impressive.

I have had the ElevenReader app for a relatively short time, but I’ve used it quite a bit so far. I appreciate that it’s pretty user-friendly. I also like the options that a person can choose. For instance there’s a nice selection of voices to choose from. Even with that you can adjust the speed of the reader, faster or slower, to suit your own listening style. Additionally, I have used it to listen to articles about the Bible. It has been very rare to find a reader that will correctly read where some verses are drawn from. For example if referring to a verse such as Psalm 83:18 most readers I’ve used usually handle that without any issues. But if citing a verse such as 2 Chronicles 6:8, invariably all the others I’ve used will read that as “two Chronicles 6:8” instead of the correct rendering “second Chronicles 6:8.” I really appreciate this. It prevents my brain from doing a slight double-take each and every time the leading number is handled as a cardinal number instead of what it should be, an ordinal number. The correct rendering helps me focus on the information and not on narration mistakes. For me this is much appreciated. Thank you!