Drop me a line at my new email address: winston.chen@opusnoma.com. Happy Reading!

With Reader going to a new home, Voice Dream Scanner and Writer will remain with me under a different company, Opus Noma. And they will be renamed to VDScan and VDWrite.

Applause Group is committed to investing in Reader and turning it into a household name. It will be stewarded by a sustainable company instead of being completely dependent on me. And that is good news for everyone who relies on Reader every day.

But I could not have done it without the users. You constantly provided me with ideas for improvements and inspired me with your personal stories of how Reader changed your lives. I will be forever grateful.

Voice Dream Reader's journey started 12 years ago as a side project during my sabbatical in Arctic Norway. Since then, it has evolved into the best text-to-speech reader, winning Apple Design Award in 2021.

I am delighted to announce that Voice Dream Reader has joined Applause Group as a leading product in their portfolio of apps.

We are listed as one of the most popular assistive technology tools teachers use with @Bookshare to support students with learning differences in their classrooms. Check out the complete list:

iOS Reader, Writer and Scanner are on sale now. iOS Reader is 40% off, and Scanner and Writer are 50% off. Sale ends January 1 2023.

Voices from @AcapelaGroup come to the Mac Reader! These include some favorites like Sharon in US English and Manon in French. Subscribers get all voices in a language of your choice at no additional charge.

If you use Speak Selection or Speak Screen, you’ll run into bugs. I did. The root cause is the same. VoiceOver only speaks short phrases so it’ll probably be okay.

This is the problem: You send the iOS TTS engine a chunk of text to read, and the engine tells you in real time which word it’s reading. That’s how Voice Dream knows, and remembers where you are in a document. So the problem is more than just highlighting.

iOS 16's Text To Speech is unusable. Whenever it encounters an acronym like "CNN" or a quotation mark, the highlight starts to drift. This bug also causes all kinds of secondary problems. Please do not update to iOS 16.0 if you use any of the iOS voices.

Just released an update to macOS Reader. Now you can save speech to an audio file! Plus, support for macOS Ventura for the brave. Ventura comes with Eloquence voices plus a bunch of other terrific new voices. The first beta is a rough but usable.

If a sighted person wants to learn speed-reading, should they start with Eloquence voices? Or should they start with a more natural TTS voice, speed up and then graduate to Eloquence voices?

Looks like Eloquence voices are coming to iOS 16 and macOS Ventura. There're 8 voices: Eddy, Flo, Grandma, Grandpa, Reed, Rock, Sandy and Shelley. Does anyone know these names? Is there a favorite?

Voice Dream Reader now supports human narrated audiobooks from @Bookshare. iOS update is out. macOS update will be out in a day or 2. Note that there're no chapter names: that data is not available in the original files. Enjoy!

Reader for macOS requires a subscription ($5/month in the US) with a 14-day free trial. I hope this can turn Voice Dream from a personal passion project to a proper company with a sustainable future.

Reader for macOS is a fully native macOS app, painstakingly developed over 3 years. User interface was designed from scratch. It is a love-song to the Mac.

Great News! Voice Dream Reader for macOS is now generally available!

Please update to version 4.14.5 from the App Store if you are experiencing the "Loading" issue. A fix has been released. Sorry for the inconvenience.