ElevenReader: Read Books Aloud

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.

This is a confusing review to leave. On the one hand, the voice quality and selection from ElevenLabs is spectacular, and it's something I use nearly daily. But on the other, the quality and experience of using the app seems to have degraded over time. Frequently with longer text, the app loses its spot, and the text highlighting gets desynced from what the voice is saying. More recently, the app sometimes seems to jump backward in playback a minute or two, seemingly at random. When it works well, it's spectacular, but these issues mar an otherwise excellent quality text-to-voice system.

I love that you can use so many useful features and tools straight from the app and 100% free🎉 if you’re looking for something to read your books or your apps I recommend this as a MS2!! It has been so helpful to get my books read to me. Thank you and I will not stop bringing this app up to my friends and colleagues!!!