Narrly: Read Aloud PDF & Text

Works well but is completely robotic. I enjoy the voice options, just wish it was a smoother read.

This is the first time I’m writing a review for an app, because I felt like it deserved the recognition. And I’ve used many apps! As a developer myself, I can tell that a lot of thought and consideration was put into the design of this app. The things that make or break good design, user experience, ease of use, etc. are 1) a solid understanding of your user and their needs and 2) attention to detail to the small things that would otherwise be invisible if done right but painfully noticeable if not addressed. The developer placed earnest effort into both areas and it shows. I like how the developer allows for the user to navigate to other areas of the text mid-session but be able to “snap” back to auto-scrolling / following the text as its spoken, I like how the text is highlighted and how there are two layers of highlighting (listening to and following a visual cue of spoken text is quite effective for me in absorbing a book and staying focused), I like how this is offline so that I can use it anywhere without internet and leverages native TTS using enhanced/premium voices, I like the custom animations the developer built and the thorough instructional video for enabling enhanced/premium voices, I like that you can export as an audio file and that you can search within the document which helps me to easily navigate to other sections based off of memory. I mainly use this for epubs, but I thought it was smart that the developer allowed for the user to set reading area which solves for the difficultly of doing OCR for non-standard formats typically in PDFs, anything that is not in “book” form. Rarely do I ever feel that the developer has anticipated what I wanted or known what I wanted in a system before I was aware of what I wanted. It’s great that I could freely use this app without paying for it, like there is a 5 document at a time max but I suppose one could game it by deleting one and adding more. There is definitely a lack of appreciation from people that aren’t even paying for this. Ultimately, I paid for the lifetime access because I think this app deserves it. Some features that would nice to have are just some coloring and text size options, small black text against stark white background could be straining over time, and if there could be grayscale or sepia plus larger text sizes that would be appreciated.

This Text-to-Speech app is remarkable. I’ve tried many and Narrly is without competition or peer.