Speak It! Application Review

Speak It!, developed by FutureApps, is a very useful tool when you are unable to speak. The main functionality of Speak It! is that it converts text to speech with incredible realism. There are a few menus within the application that I would like to go over. The first screen is the text entry screen, which is displayed when you first open the application. Below is a picture of the aforementioned screen:


You can see the standard iPhone keyboard, and above that are two buttons: “Say it!” and “Done.” When you enter text into the above box, you can press the “Say it!” button to hear your text turned into spoken words. But, the fun does not stop there. If you press “Done,” the keyboard disappears and you are presented with a scrolling wheel of “Select Voice” options, seen below.


There are four options: Male American Voice, Female American Voice, Male British Voice, and Female British Voice. All of these voices sound very real and not automated at all like some text to speech programs (*cough* Mac OSX Alex *cough*) sometimes do. At the bottom of this post are audio samples of the voices used by the application. Now, with any application, there is also a settings page. While there are relatively few things to customize in this application, there is still a settings page, which you can see below.


There are two options within this menu, one being “Voice Volume,” and the other being “Voice Speed.” While these are pretty self-explanatory, just to clarify, “Voice Volume” adjusts the loudness of the output voice, and “Voice Speed” adjusts how fast the selected voice reads your inputted text. There is also a How To guide built right into the application if you are still unsure about something. The next feature I will be talking about is one of great usefulness. This is the ability to save your currently entered text for future use. That way, when you need to use that text again in Speak It!, you do not need to reenter it. The “Save It!” button can be seen below.

You can then access your saved phrases by going to the “Saved Phrases” menu, shown below.



When there is a saved phrase in the menu, all you have to do is simply tap on it. Then, Speak It! will load the text and you can modify the voice, change the text, or “Say It!”

Overall, I was very impressed by the realism that this application brings to the table. I have never heard such clarity in even a Mac or PC application and I must congratulate FutureApps for putting so much power in such a small device.

Ratings:

Functionality: 9.9/10
Aesthetic Design: 10/10
Intuitiveness: 10/10
Speed: 10/10

Total Score: 39.9/40

Explanation of Ratings and Closing Comments:

While I previously said that the functionality of the application is great, there was one feature missing that I would have expected in such an application. The first is the ability to export the generated audio so it could be used on a computer. This criticism is also a compliment in disguise. The audio generated by this application is just so crisp, clear and real that I would like to be able to use the generated audio elsewhere. Aesthetically, this application is beautiful and I found no flaws in it. The intuitiveness of this application is great and it truly resembles the feel of Apple, many easy to use buttons and scroll menus, and it presents them in a sleek, easy to use manner. As for the speed of the application, I saw no lag during all of my testing and nothing ever froze, even when I entered a long entry of text. I would definitely recommend this application to anyone looking for a text-to-speech application for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Audio Samples: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=FUUWZ6IU

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