Text Reader 1.2

Text Reader is an app that can turn text to speech. This application was last updated in 2003; that was 8 years ago, ages in computer time.

Since then, Mac OS X has introduced its own text-to-speech system, so some of the features of this app might feel redundant. Still, it is nice to see what developers were up to a few years ago.

Text Reader lets you type text and the computer read it for you. But the more interesting feature is that you can save your texts as an audio file and then add it to iTunes. Basically, you can type a paragraph, for example, or even paste text from other apps, and have the app convert that text to an audio file in the AIFF format. You can then play that file on any audio player, including iTunes, and send it to mobile devices. There are a few customization options. You can change the pitch and rate of the computer voice. By default, pitch is 50 and rate is 180. I changed this to 30 and 160 and the voice sounded much more bearable.

Text Reader lets you export your recordings directly to iTunes, and you can even customize the artist, genre and playlist information.