Recommended text-to-speech app for iPhone?

[Maverick2002]

Is there a good text-to-speech app for iPhone? Preferably free, but wouldn't mind paying a little, particularly if it can transcribe photos (so a head-on photo of a page of text gets transcribed)?

TIA

 

[TheStu]

OH, you want OCR? Not dictation.

 

[Maverick2002]

OCR?

I want something where (if possible) I can take a picture of a page and have the app transcribe it and read it back to me.

Maybe it would require 2 apps - one that pulls text from an image, and another one that's text-to-speech.

 

[TheStu]

OCR?

I want something where (if possible) I can take a picture of a page and have the app transcribe it and read it back to me.

Maybe it would require 2 apps - one that pulls text from an image, and another one that's text-to-speech.

OCR is Optical Character Recognition. It's what scanner software uses to convert images of pages back into text. As for one that will then read it to you... Hmm.

There's JotNot and PDFpen Scan+ that you can check out that will do step 1. Not sure about step 2. Maybe this...

Copy the OCR'd text into a note, then ask Siri to read it to you.

 

[Rakehellion]

Text-to-speech is built into the OS, so you can just highlight text, tap the right arrow that comes on the screen, and choose "Speak."

 

[TheStu]

Text-to-speech is built into the OS, so you can just highlight text, tap the right arrow that comes on the screen, and choose "Speak."

That works too.

 

[Maverick2002]

Awesome, will check them out, thanks!

EDIT: JotNot doesn't seem to be able to do OCR, at least not the free version.

 

[Oyeve]

N/M

 

[dave_the_nerd]

There's a Ricoh app that will let you take a picture. It uploads it to their website and converts to text, then emails it to you.

Acrobat Pro will also do a "hidden" OCR in a PDF - embeds the text in behind the graphic, but it's searchable and available to screen readers. Acrobat's OCR is a lot better, imo.

 

[Maverick2002]

There's a Ricoh app that will let you take a picture. It uploads it to their website and converts to text, then emails it to you.

Acrobat Pro will also do a "hidden" OCR in a PDF - embeds the text in behind the graphic, but it's searchable and available to screen readers. Acrobat's OCR is a lot better, imo.

With acrobat pro, how does that work (with regards to mobile devices like an iphone)?

Here's the scenario I'm thinking of:

1) Need to read a page, but don't have time.
2) Take a photo of the page on iphone.
3) Iphone reads it back to me while I'm driving/running/otherwise occupied.