Mi Speaks 2.0

Books and PDFs read aloud by neural voices, on device

iOS

Productivity

Artificial Intelligence

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Hi Product Hunt, Blaine here. I launched Mi Speaks here last December, and this is the first update big enough to come back with. The weak spot of 1.x was that it sounded like a phone reading to you: it used the system voices, and a fresh iPhone only has the compact ones. So 2.0 is mostly about the voice. There are now 28 Studio Voices, American and British, generated by a neural model entirely on your iPhone. Your text is never uploaded, there's no account, and it works in airplane mode. Running a neural voice on the phone has one real limit: iOS won't let an app use the graphics processor while it's off screen. So there's Prepare Full Document, which renders the whole book up front and then plays to the end with the screen locked. If you skip that, reading doesn't stop. Any passage that isn't ready yet is read in your system voice. Also new since last time: PDFs open as the actual page with the spoken word highlighted where it sits, chapters come from the book's outline (or from its headings when it has none), there's an Apple Watch app that gets the prepared Studio audio from your phone, and a Resume Reading widget. The free tier used to cut you off at 255 characters, which meant nobody could really try it. Now free has no length limit: any document, any voice already on your device, three saved documents. Premium adds the Studio Voices, an unlimited synced library, audio export and Turbo speeds. You can buy it monthly, yearly, or once for life, and the subscriptions start with a 7-day trial. What do you listen to most, and which voice did you end up picking? I'd like to hear what sounds wrong, too.