Reader FAQ

In Safari or Chrome, tap on the Share button, which is the button with a box and an arrow coming out of the top. In the bottom row, you should find “Save To Voice Dream”. If not, tap on “More” and enable “Save To Voice Dream”.

After you tap on “Save to Voice Dream”, the best choice is to select “Article” and then Save. If you want to read it right away, then tap on “Open” instead of “Save.

You can also paste an URL into Voice Dream, but it is recommended to use the Save To Voice Dream functionality to ensure content behind a paywall is saved.

If you have a large library, the initial synchronization can take a while, so please be patient. This is particularly true if you do not use Wifi or have a slow Wifi connection.

Also, verify that on both devices, you’re signed in to iCloud with the same user ID, enabled iCloud Drive, and enabled Cloud Sync in Voice Dream.

Finally, please make sure that you have enough storage in Cloud Drive. If you run out of space, then you will see a partial library.

In any case, if you change your mind about enabling Cloud Sync, you can just disable it, and you will see all your documents again.

Not directly. Most books you buy commericially have DRM (Digital Rights Management), which means they are encrypted and can only be opened in their native apps. This is stated clearly in the description of Voice Dream Reader in the App Store.

There’re ways to remove DRM. For example, for Kindle books, please search for “Apprentice Alf” in Google, you’ll find the links to DRM Removal tools. Kindle books also require an extra step to convert from MOBI format to EPUB format.

Most of us wish DRM would go away, but unfortunately, for eBooks, they do not appear to be going anywhere.

Voice Dream Reader tries to detect the language of the document and choose a voice in that language. But sometimes it gets it wrong. But you can change the language from Audio Settings.

Most likely, another app grabbed the main audio.

In iOS, the app in the foreground has full control of audio output. If you put it in the background, either by pushing the Power button or Home button, Voice Dream Reader tells iOS, “Don’t shut me down. I’m playing audio!” However, if another app forcefully tries to grab audio, iOS will stop the audio from Voice Dream Reader, because it’s not in the foreground.

On your new device:

  1. In iOS Settings, check that you’re logged into the Apple ID you used to purchase the app.
  2. In iOS Settings, check that you’ve enabled iCloud, using the same ID as your other device.
  3. In iOS Settings, check that you’ve enabled iCloud Drive.
  4. If you passed all 3 steps above, please turn off iCloud Drive and turn it back on.
  5. Terminate the app and restart. Now your free voice should be available.

This can happen when you use a Bluetooth headset, because there is often a slight delay for streaming audio wirelessly. The delay is particularly long when using built-in iOS voices. (The built-in iOS voices, while free and convenient, do have a number of issues that we cannot work around.)

If you want to use a Bluetooth headset, please use one of the premium voices such as Sharon or Heather. Alternatively, you can use wired earbuds or headphones.

No. Our agreement with the providers of text-to-speech voices do not permit this feature. Plus, the audio from the app is for personal use only. This is the reason that we can offers these high quality voices at such a low cost. If you want to use the audio output for commercial purposes, please contact the vendors directly: Acapela, NeoSpeech and Ivona.

Thank you! That would be very helpful.

Please send us an email telling us what was happening right before it crashed. A crash log would be hugely helpful. To get the crash log, follow these steps:

  1. On your device, open Settings app.
  2. Go to Privacy, then Diagnostics & Usage.
  3. Select Diagnostics & Usage Data.
  4. Locate the log for the crashed app. The logs will be named in the format: Voice Dream Reader_DateTime_DeviceName. If you cannot see the time, open the log and the time stamp will be on top.
  5. Select the log that you believe represent the crash. Then, using the text selection UI select the entire text of the log. Once the text is selected, tap Copy.
  6. Paste the copied text to Mail and send to support@voicedream.com.

I am using a BrailleNote Apex BT32 and an iPhone 4S, but I hope these basic instructions will be general enough to work with any Braille display and iOS device.

  1. With a file open in Voice Dream, move to the first element on the screen by pressing Space with dots 1-2-3 on the Braille keyboard.
  2. Move through the various elements using Space with dot 4 or an equivalent command that may be available if your Braille display has navigation keys, until you reach the words ‘Next item’.
  3. You can now start reading the contents of the file by panning the Braille display to the right in the usual way, i.e. pressing Space with dot or using an equivalent command, if available on your display. Continue to pan the display to the right until you reach the end of the block of text that is currently visible. You will know that you have reached the end when the focus lands on the ‘Bookmark’ button.
  4. Now pan the Braille display once to the left, using Space with dot 2 or an equivalent navigation command. This will move the focus back into the text area and the Braille display will be blank. This step is important, otherwise the Scroll command in the next step will not work.
  5. To scroll to the next page of text, press Space with dots 1-4-5-6. This is the ‘Scroll down one page’ command and it is the equivalent of a ‘Three-finger swipe up’ using VoiceOver on the touchscreen. To scroll up to the previous page, press Space with dots 3-4-5-6, which is the equivalent of a ‘three-finger swipe down’.
  6. Once the Scroll command has been executed, the Braille display briefly shows the percentage of progress through the file, and then it goes blank. The focus is placed at the beginning of the next page of text and you can read it by panning repeatedly to the right in the usual way, until you reach the ‘Bookmark’ button. Repeat these steps to continue reading through the file.

NOTE: You will notice that the text overlaps slightly from one page to the next, so the last few words of the previous page are repeated at the beginning of the next page. Thanks to Nicky Sanders for supplying these instructions.

If you want to build a large pronunciation dictionary, you might want to create or edit the rules on your Mac or PC. Fortunately, you can create or edit the rules using a plain text editor and paste it into Voice Dream Reader. The syntax rules are very simple:

  • One line per rule.
  • For each rule, there’re 5 fields separate by commas. The field are:
    1. Search text. In double quotes. This is the string that you want to search for.
    2. Match mode. 0=Word, 1=Anywhere, 2=Regular Expression. For word search, it is considered a match only if the search text is a single word, and it appears in the text as a single word and not a part of another word. “Any Text” search results in a match no matter where the search text appears even if it’s a full sentence, or a string that appears as a part of a word.
    3. Ignore case. Y=Yes, N=No.
    4. Pronunciation text. In double quotes. This is how you want the search text pronounced.
    5. Pronunciation rule type: 0=Pronounce As, 1=Skip. If the value is 1 (Skip), then the pronunciation text is ignored.

For example, to skip the words “Moby Dick” since it is the book’s title which appears on every page of a PDF file, the rule is:

“Moby Dick”,1,N,””,1

You want to match “Anywhere” because the search text is not a word. And you don’t want to ignore case, because you don’t want to skip the words “moby dick” in the main text.

To pronounce “lol” as “laughing out loud”, the rules is:

“lol”,0,Y,”laughing out loud”,0

Here, you want to match by word, so that “lollipop” would not be affected. And you want to ignore case because you want to replace all caps “LOL” also.

To back up your Voice Dream library using the Finder on the Mac:

  1. Plug your iOS device into your Mac using the supplied cable.
  2. Open  the  Finder window by clicking the Finder icon from the Dock.
  3. Locate and click your iOS device’s name in the sidebar.
  4. Click Trust in the Finder window. (First time connections will be asked to Trust device.)
  5. Tap Trust on your device when prompted, then enter your passcode to confirm.
  6. In the General tab, click the circle next to where it says Back up all of the data on your [iPhone/iPad/iPod touch] to this Mac.
  7. If you don’t want to create an encrypted backup, or you’ve already set up encrypted backups, click Back Up Now at the bottom of the General tab.
  8. When the backup is finished, you can find the date and time of the last backup in the General tab, just above the Manage Backups button.

With the Pronunciation Dictionary, you can tell Voice Dream Reader to skip text without reading it outloud. For example, if you want to skip the title of a book:

  1. With the text open in the Reader, go to Voice Settings-Pronunciation Dictionary.
  2. Tap on “+” to create a new entry.
  3. For the entry name, type in the text you want skip, like “War and Peace”.
  4. Set the match type to Any Text.
  5. Set Ignore Case to On.
  6. Set it to “Skip”.

You can also select the text on the screen and then tap on “Pronounce” in the pop-up menu.

If you’re adventurous, you can try using Regular Expression, or RegEx. RegEx is a way to express any pattern in text. For example:

  • Chapter and Verse in the Bible is “[0-9]+:[0-9]+”
  • Any text inside parenthesis is “\(([^)]+)\)”

To skip text using RegEx, just enter the pattern without the quotes, and set it to match with RegEx as match type.

Cloud voices, which charge by character, are too expensive (and slow sometimes) to be used in Voice Dream Reader. Most users read a lot!

  1. Check that your device is signed into the same Apple ID as used to purchase the app.
  2. Check that your device has iCloud Drive enabled (found under the Apple ID portion of the iOS Settings app).
  3. Check that Voice Dream is enabled under the iCloud Drive section of the Settings app.
  4. Check that your device has iCloud Sync enabled from within the Voice Dream app. This is found under the app’s Settings menu > Library Settings > Sync Library Using iCloud.

Go to Settings-Manage My Voices, and swipe left on the voice you don’t want. The Delete button will appear.

Left swipe is a standard iOS gesture for deleting an row in a table.

  • One-finger tap. Hide and unhide the controls.
  • Two-finger tap. Scrolls to the highlighted text being read after you’ve manually scrolled away from it.
  • Two-finger swipe left and right. Same functionality as the rewind and fast forward buttons.
  • Double tap. Double tap on a word to start reading from that word.
  • Double finger double tap. Same functionality as the play-or-pause button.
  • Press and hold. Bring up menu for seeing the dictionary definition of a word, create a bookmark at the paragraph, or highlight the current sentence.
  • Pinch and un-pinch. Or, squeeze and expand. Enter or exit Focused Reading Mode.

Many people prefer a distraction free screen without a lot of text. Voice Dream Reader is equipped with Focused Reading Mode. To activate, pinch the screen with two fingers, and the speech text area will be reduced to about a third of the screen in the middle. In addition, the text will be scrolled automatically so that the word and line being spoken is always in the middle. To bring back the full screen, un-pinch or expand the text area with two fingers. Keep in mind that you finger tips must start out from inside the reduced text area.

Yes, but you will need to install a scanning app. You want to download a scanning app that:

  • Uses the camera on your device.
  • Perform OCR. OCR is the process that converts a photograph of text into actual text information that computers can understand.
  • Produce a PDF file and Exporting it.

Many apps can do this, such as ABBYY FineReader and Snap2PDF.

After scanning and performing OCR, Export a PDF (or Searchable PDF) and “Open In…” Voice Dream. This workflow is very efficient and just as good as if OCR is built-into Voice Dream Reader.

Most likely, it’s because the PDF files contain scans of text. You need to perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to extract text information from scans.

No, unless the PDF file contains an OCR layer. When you scan a document into a PDF file, the file contains images of text. To convert images into actual text, you need to do OCR (Optical Character Recognition).

We developers do not have access to the system that keeps track of your purchases and payments, so you’ll have to get a refund from Apple. Click there for step-by-step instructions.

Reader User Manual

Getting Started

The controls for text-to-speech are similar to those for listening to music. You can play and pause just as you would in any music player. The marker for speech is a highlighted word called the speech cursor. Voice Dream Reader remembers the location of the speech cursor so that when you open the article or book later, you can resume from where you left off.

Gesture Tip: Tapping the text area with two finger twice (double-finger double tap) does the same thing as the Play or Pause button. This gesture works with VoiceOver turned on or off.

By default, the rewind and fast forward buttons move the speech cursor backward or forward by 30 seconds. Instead of 30 seconds, you can change that to a sentence, paragraph, page, chapter, bookmark, highlight, 15, 30 or 60 seconds. These are called Navigation Units. The current Navigation Unit is shown at the bottom right in the footer. Tap it to change it to something else.

Gesture Tip: You can press the rewind or fast forward button and hold, the list of Navigation Units would appear. Select the unit, that does two things: it changes the current Navigation Unit to what you selected and then performs a rewind or fast forward in the new Navigation Unit.

Gesture Tip: Swiping left or right with two fingers does the same thing as the rewind and fast forward buttons.

Gesture Tip: Swiping up or down with two fingers increases or decreases speaking rate.

Gesture Tip: Some documents, like PDF files, can be viewed both in the original layout and as plain text. To switch between the views, swipe right with one finger from the left edge of the screen. Swipe left from the right edge also works.

Tap anywhere in the text box to enter full screen mode. Tapping again brings back the controls at the top and bottom. By default, the app enters full screen mode a few seconds after you press Play, but you can disable auto-full screen from Advanced Settings.

While listening, you can scroll to a different part of the text freely using the text box or the slider at the bottom. You can also tap on the percentage or page number in the footer at the bottom to go to a different part of the text. You can double tap (tapping twice in quick succession) on any word, and Voice Dream Reader will start reading from that word. To scroll back to the speech cursor, tap the screen with two fingers.

Many people prefer a distraction free screen without a lot of text. Voice Dream Reader is equipped with Focused Reading Mode. To activate, pinch the screen with two fingers, and the speech text area will be reduced to about a third of the screen in the middle. In addition, the text will be scrolled automatically so that the word and line being spoken is always in the middle. To bring back the full screen, un-pinch or expand the text area with two fingers.

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Advanced Reader Controls

If you press on a word and hold, the selection markers and selection menu appears. The behavior is the same as any other text box in iOS. Among other commands, you can create a bookmark, text highlight, and add a note. To delete a bookmark, highlight or note, tap on the symbol in the margins and press Delete.

The Bookmark button to the left lets you pull up chapters, bookmarks and highlights or highlights with notes. You can also tap on the chapter name in the footer to bring up the same menu.

When the end of an article is reached, the default behavior is to play a sound and advance to the next article on the list currently shown in the Home screen. You can change the default behavior in the Advanced Setting section in Settings. However, when you’re playing from the Playlist, Voice Dream Reader will always advance to the next article regardless of the setting.

Some people like to listen to a book at night before going to sleep. You can set a timer by pressing on the Play or Pause button and hold. Once you start the timer, a clock icon will show up at the bottom of the screen. The Reader will stop reading when time is up. To stop the timer, just tap on the clock icon.

The Voice Setting button at top of the Reader screen lets you change how text is spoken. You can change how fast the text is read using the Speech Rate slider. You can also change the Voice — if you’ve purchased additional Voices. See the next section for more detail on how Voice Dream Reader handles languages and voices.

The Visual Setting button next to it allows you to change the visual appearance of the document.

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Managing Voices

When a new article or book is loaded in Voice Dream Reader, we automatically detect the language of the text. The first time you listen to it, we’ll use the preferred voice for that language. (Preferred voice can be set by tapping on “More Info” from a voice in Settings-Manage My Voices or from Voice Settings. While listening, you can pick a different voice for that language if you have more than one. Voice Dream remembers that and will use it the next time you open the article or book.

Besides setting a preferred voice, you can also fine tune the default speech rate, pitch, and volume of a voice from the same screen.

When you start listening to a new article or book, Voice Dream Reader selects an appropriate voice, and read the text using the default Speech Rate for that voice. In Voice Settings, it’ll say “Speech Rate (Default)”. If you change the speech rate in Voice Settings, you’ll override the default by setting an item-specific speech rate. From then one, that article or book will always be read with that speech rate regardless which voice you choose.

Voice Dream Reader is equipped with a highly advanced personal pronunciation dictionary. There is a separate dictionary for each language, and a dictionary consists of multiple entries. To create an entry, tap on “+” under pronunciation dictionary.

You can choose from three ways to match the entry text: “Word”, “Anywhere”, or “RegEx”. “Word” means the text should be an independent word, while “Anywhere” would try to find the entry text even if it’s a part of another word. For example: dictionary entry for “wonder” would not affect “wonderful” if you choose “Word”, but it would affect it if you choose “Anywhere”.”

“RegEx” stands for Regular Expression, a powerful text pattern matching language. For example, the chapter-verse in the Bible can be described with “

[0-9]+:[0-9]+”. There’s many good RegEx tutorials on line if you’re interested in learning how to use this powerful technology.

Once a match is found using any of the matching options, you can tell Voice Dream Reader to skip all text that match, or to pronounce it as if it’s another piece of text. For example, you can pronounce “lol” as “laughing out loud”, or spell out “MAD” as “M-A-D”.

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Loading Content from Files

Voice Dream Reader can open files with the following formats:

  • Adobe PDF (.pdf)
  • DRM-free EPUB eBooks (.epub)
  • DAISY text or audio books (.zip)
  • Plain Text (.txt and .text)
  • Microsoft Word (.doc and .docx)
  • Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt and .pptx)
  • Apple Pages (.page)
  • Apple Keynote (.key)
  • HTML (.html and .htm)
  • Rich Text Format (.rtf)
  • Audio (.mp3, .mp4, .m4a)

There’re three ways to open a file: from the Dropbox or Google Drive directly in Voice Dream Reader, using iTunes to move files from you PC or Mac, and from another app on your device.

The easiest way is to use Dropbox or Google Drive. First, go to Settings-Dropbox and enable access. After you authorize Voice Dream Reader access, from Voice Dream Reader you can open files by pushing the “+” button at the bottom of the Home screen and select Dropbox or Google Drive.

To move files using iTunes, open iTunes on your PC or Mac. Select your device under “Devices” on the left, and then click on “Apps” along the top. Scroll down to “File Sharing” section and you’ll find Voice Dream Reader in the list of App. Select it, and click on “Add..” button to the right to select the files to move to your device. Once the files are moved to Voice Dream Reader on your device, open Voice Dream Reader, tap “+” and “iTunes” to import the files.

The other way is to do it from another app. Many iPad and iPhone apps can open files: you’ve probably opened attachments in the Mail app. After you open the attachment, you’ll see the Action button at the top. The button looks like a box with an arrow coming out of it. Click on that, click on Open In… and select Voice Dream Reader. You can do this from any app that presents content with the Open In… option, such as Good Reader and box.net.

Either way, once you open the file, Voice Dream Reader will extract text from the file and store it in its own database. You’ll be able to listen to it offline, and you don’t need the original file any more.

You can download eBooks from Gutenberg for free directly from Voice Dream Reader. Press the “+” button from the Home screen and select Gutenberg. Navigate to the book you want, and select the “EPUB (no image) version to the book to download.

Finally, you can download eBooks from Bookshare, if you have a Bookshare account. You’ll first need to enter your user ID and password in Settings. Then, Bookshare will appear as an option when you press the “+” button.

Note: DRM-protected eBooks from iBooks, Kindle, Nook, Adobe OverDrive cannot be opened in Voice Dream Reader.

Note: If a DAISY book contains both audio and text, we only retain the text, since almost all full-text-full audio books use TTS.

Note: Besides supporting DAISY audiobooks, we also supports zipped MP3 files without an index. The ZIP file creates a single book item in Voice Dream. The name of the ZIP file becomes the title, and each MP3 file becomes a chapter with the name of the file as chapter name. Please make sure the file names are sorted in the same order as it appears in the book. Having a “track number” works great. For example, “01 Chapter 1.mp3”, “02 Chapter 2.mp3”, etc.

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Loading Content from the Web

The easiest way to listen to a Web page is to use our built-in Browser. Click on the “+” button from the Home screen, and select Web Browser. The browser will pop up, and you can type in or paste an URL. You have two options to save the Web page: “Smart Save” and “Save All”. Smart Save tries to intelligently strip out the extraneous stuff on the Web page like menus and ads. Smart Save does not work on Web sites that requires you to log in and occasionally it could make mistakes. The other option is “Save All”, which saves all the text that appear on the Web page and works on Web sites that require logging-in. If you like, you can use the Editor to remove the text you don’t want.

If you rather use Safari, or another browser on your device, you can create a special bookmark to link it to Voice Dream. When you want to listen to a page, you can tap on the special bookmark, which would open Voice Dream and place the current web page in Voice Dream’s browser. At that point, you can do a “Smart Save” or “Save All” to extract text.

To create the special bookmark:

  • 1. Go to any Web page and tap on “Action” and “Bookmark” to create a bookmark. Put it in Favorites.
  • 2. Open up Bookmarks and find the page that contains the bookmark you just created. Tap on Edit.
  • 3. Tap the bookmark you just created. In the first field, give it a new name: “Open in Voice Dream”.
  • 4. In the second URL field, paste in the following:
    javascript:window.location=”com.voicedream.reader://open?url=”+window.location

You can also use a bookmarking service. If you already use Pocket (formerly Read It Later) or Instapaper, enter your user ID and password in Settings, and press the Refresh button in the Home screen to download unread articles.

For both services, Voice Dream Reader downloads “Unread” articles, and you can download the most recent 50, 100, 200, or 500 articles. If you have older articles on your device, they’ll be deleted from Voice Dream Reader (not from Pocket or Instapaper).

After you delete an article in Voice Dream Reader, the next refresh will move these articles to Archive in the cloud. Currently, Pocket supports the reverse: when you archive an article in Pocket, it will be deleted in Voice Dream Reader. This option can be turned on or off under Settings-Pocket.

Finally, you can Reset the connection in Settings-Pocket or Instapaper. Resetting will delete all articles in Voice Dream Reader and you’ll need to Refresh to download all the articles again.

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Managing Content

Folders

Voice Dream Reader lets you use folders to manage your content. To see folders, click on the File Cabinet icon in the Home screen. (You can also click on the Title in the middle of the top bar). The File Cabinet first shows All Items and Playlist. If you enabled Pocket or Instapaper, it’ll show those also. These are special, system folders. You cannot edit them.

You can create you own folders, like “Books” or “Junk”. Press the “+” button the File Cabinet to create a folder. You can also rename folders or re-arrange them by pressing on the Edit button in the File Cabinet.

To move articles and books to a folder, you need to be in the Home screen. Press the Edit button all the way to the right, and you’ll enter Edit mode. Then, you can select the items by tapping on the them, and click on the Move button to move it to your own folder.

When you’re in Edit mode, pressing the Trash button permanently deletes the articles you selected. When you delete articles from Pocket or Instapaper, they’ll be marked “Read” or “Archived” there also. This works even if you’re offline; we mark these articles and tell Pocket and Instapaper about it the next time you Refresh. The “Unread” button moves the speech cursor to the beginning of the text.

You can sort the items in the current folder by Add Date, Title, Author, or Size. You can assign a different sort field for each folder.

A couple of neat iPad and iPhone features — many people don’t know about them — are very handy. One, you can swipe left on an item and the Delete button will pop up on that item. Two, you can tap on the thin status bar that shows battery life at the top to scroll to the top of the list.

Playlist

Playlist is a special folder. It’s special because one, you can pick any text item to include in your Playlist without moving them. Two, you can arrange the items in any order you like after you press the Edit button.. Three, if you remove an item from the Playlist, it is not deleted from the device permanently: it’s simply removed from the Playlist. Lastly, items in the Playlist are always played back-to-back.

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Tips for VoiceOver Users

  • Full screen mode is disabled. In fact, when you turn VoiceOver on, Voice Dream automatically exists full-screen mode.
  • Focused Reading Mode is disabled.
  • To invoke the sleep timer, select the Play or Pause button first. Then, do a quick tap, followed by tap and hold.
  • To set the Navigation Unit on the fly using the rewind or fast forward button, use the same gesture of tap then tap and hold.
  • Voice Dream Reader scrolls automatically so that the line of text containing the speech cursor is always in the middle of the screen.
  • The Voice Settings button is the reader can be swiped up or down to quickly increase or decrease speech rate. There is no need to double tap and get into the Voice Setting screen.
  • The Play Or Pause button can be swiped up and down to rewind or fast forward.

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[0-9]+:[0-9]+”. There’s many good RegEx tutorials on line if you’re interested in learning how to use this powerful technology.

Once a match is found using any of the matching options, you can tell Voice Dream Reader to skip all text that match, or to pronounce it as if it’s another piece of text. For example, you can pronounce “lol” as “laughing out loud”, or spell out “MAD” as “M-A-D”.

Back to the top

Loading Content from Files

Voice Dream Reader can open files with the following formats:

  • Adobe PDF (.pdf)
  • DRM-free EPUB eBooks (.epub)
  • DAISY text or audio books (.zip)
  • Plain Text (.txt and .text)
  • Microsoft Word (.doc and .docx)
  • Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt and .pptx)
  • Apple Pages (.page)
  • Apple Keynote (.key)
  • HTML (.html and .htm)
  • Rich Text Format (.rtf)
  • Audio (.mp3, .mp4, .m4a)

There’re three ways to open a file: from the Dropbox or Google Drive directly in Voice Dream Reader, using iTunes to move files from you PC or Mac, and from another app on your device.

The easiest way is to use Dropbox or Google Drive. First, go to Settings-Dropbox and enable access. After you authorize Voice Dream Reader access, from Voice Dream Reader you can open files by pushing the “+” button at the bottom of the Home screen and select Dropbox or Google Drive.

To move files using iTunes, open iTunes on your PC or Mac. Select your device under “Devices” on the left, and then click on “Apps” along the top. Scroll down to “File Sharing” section and you’ll find Voice Dream Reader in the list of App. Select it, and click on “Add..” button to the right to select the files to move to your device. Once the files are moved to Voice Dream Reader on your device, open Voice Dream Reader, tap “+” and “iTunes” to import the files.

The other way is to do it from another app. Many iPad and iPhone apps can open files: you’ve probably opened attachments in the Mail app. After you open the attachment, you’ll see the Action button at the top. The button looks like a box with an arrow coming out of it. Click on that, click on Open In… and select Voice Dream Reader. You can do this from any app that presents content with the Open In… option, such as Good Reader and box.net.

Either way, once you open the file, Voice Dream Reader will extract text from the file and store it in its own database. You’ll be able to listen to it offline, and you don’t need the original file any more.

You can download eBooks from Gutenberg for free directly from Voice Dream Reader. Press the “+” button from the Home screen and select Gutenberg. Navigate to the book you want, and select the “EPUB (no image) version to the book to download.

Finally, you can download eBooks from Bookshare, if you have a Bookshare account. You’ll first need to enter your user ID and password in Settings. Then, Bookshare will appear as an option when you press the “+” button.

Note: DRM-protected eBooks from iBooks, Kindle, Nook, Adobe OverDrive cannot be opened in Voice Dream Reader.

Note: If a DAISY book contains both audio and text, we only retain the text, since almost all full-text-full audio books use TTS.

Note: Besides supporting DAISY audiobooks, we also supports zipped MP3 files without an index. The ZIP file creates a single book item in Voice Dream. The name of the ZIP file becomes the title, and each MP3 file becomes a chapter with the name of the file as chapter name. Please make sure the file names are sorted in the same order as it appears in the book. Having a “track number” works great. For example, “01 Chapter 1.mp3”, “02 Chapter 2.mp3”, etc.

Back to the top

Loading Content from the Web

The easiest way to listen to a Web page is to use our built-in Browser. Click on the “+” button from the Home screen, and select Web Browser. The browser will pop up, and you can type in or paste an URL. You have two options to save the Web page: “Smart Save” and “Save All”. Smart Save tries to intelligently strip out the extraneous stuff on the Web page like menus and ads. Smart Save does not work on Web sites that requires you to log in and occasionally it could make mistakes. The other option is “Save All”, which saves all the text that appear on the Web page and works on Web sites that require logging-in. If you like, you can use the Editor to remove the text you don’t want.

If you rather use Safari, or another browser on your device, you can create a special bookmark to link it to Voice Dream. When you want to listen to a page, you can tap on the special bookmark, which would open Voice Dream and place the current web page in Voice Dream’s browser. At that point, you can do a “Smart Save” or “Save All” to extract text.

To create the special bookmark:

  • 1. Go to any Web page and tap on “Action” and “Bookmark” to create a bookmark. Put it in Favorites.
  • 2. Open up Bookmarks and find the page that contains the bookmark you just created. Tap on Edit.
  • 3. Tap the bookmark you just created. In the first field, give it a new name: “Open in Voice Dream”.
  • 4. In the second URL field, paste in the following:
    javascript:window.location=”com.voicedream.reader://open?url=”+window.location

You can also use a bookmarking service. If you already use Pocket (formerly Read It Later) or Instapaper, enter your user ID and password in Settings, and press the Refresh button in the Home screen to download unread articles.

For both services, Voice Dream Reader downloads “Unread” articles, and you can download the most recent 50, 100, 200, or 500 articles. If you have older articles on your device, they’ll be deleted from Voice Dream Reader (not from Pocket or Instapaper).

After you delete an article in Voice Dream Reader, the next refresh will move these articles to Archive in the cloud. Currently, Pocket supports the reverse: when you archive an article in Pocket, it will be deleted in Voice Dream Reader. This option can be turned on or off under Settings-Pocket.

Finally, you can Reset the connection in Settings-Pocket or Instapaper. Resetting will delete all articles in Voice Dream Reader and you’ll need to Refresh to download all the articles again.

Back to the top

Managing Content

Folders

Voice Dream Reader lets you use folders to manage your content. To see folders, click on the File Cabinet icon in the Home screen. (You can also click on the Title in the middle of the top bar). The File Cabinet first shows All Items and Playlist. If you enabled Pocket or Instapaper, it’ll show those also. These are special, system folders. You cannot edit them.

You can create you own folders, like “Books” or “Junk”. Press the “+” button the File Cabinet to create a folder. You can also rename folders or re-arrange them by pressing on the Edit button in the File Cabinet.

To move articles and books to a folder, you need to be in the Home screen. Press the Edit button all the way to the right, and you’ll enter Edit mode. Then, you can select the items by tapping on the them, and click on the Move button to move it to your own folder.

When you’re in Edit mode, pressing the Trash button permanently deletes the articles you selected. When you delete articles from Pocket or Instapaper, they’ll be marked “Read” or “Archived” there also. This works even if you’re offline; we mark these articles and tell Pocket and Instapaper about it the next time you Refresh. The “Unread” button moves the speech cursor to the beginning of the text.

You can sort the items in the current folder by Add Date, Title, Author, or Size. You can assign a different sort field for each folder.

A couple of neat iPad and iPhone features — many people don’t know about them — are very handy. One, you can swipe left on an item and the Delete button will pop up on that item. Two, you can tap on the thin status bar that shows battery life at the top to scroll to the top of the list.

Playlist

Playlist is a special folder. It’s special because one, you can pick any text item to include in your Playlist without moving them. Two, you can arrange the items in any order you like after you press the Edit button.. Three, if you remove an item from the Playlist, it is not deleted from the device permanently: it’s simply removed from the Playlist. Lastly, items in the Playlist are always played back-to-back.

Back to the top

Tips for VoiceOver Users

  • Full screen mode is disabled. In fact, when you turn VoiceOver on, Voice Dream automatically exists full-screen mode.
  • Focused Reading Mode is disabled.
  • To invoke the sleep timer, select the Play or Pause button first. Then, do a quick tap, followed by tap and hold.
  • To set the Navigation Unit on the fly using the rewind or fast forward button, use the same gesture of tap then tap and hold.
  • Voice Dream Reader scrolls automatically so that the line of text containing the speech cursor is always in the middle of the screen.
  • The Voice Settings button is the reader can be swiped up or down to quickly increase or decrease speech rate. There is no need to double tap and get into the Voice Setting screen.
  • The Play Or Pause button can be swiped up and down to rewind or fast forward.

Back to the top

[0-9]+:[0-9]+”. There’s many good RegEx tutorials on line if you’re interested in learning how to use this powerful technology.

Once a match is found using any of the matching options, you can tell Voice Dream Reader to skip all text that match, or to pronounce it as if it’s another piece of text. For example, you can pronounce “lol” as “laughing out loud”, or spell out “MAD” as “M-A-D”.

Back to the top

Loading Content from Files

Voice Dream Reader can open files with the following formats:

  • Adobe PDF (.pdf)
  • DRM-free EPUB eBooks (.epub)
  • DAISY text or audio books (.zip)
  • Plain Text (.txt and .text)
  • Microsoft Word (.doc and .docx)
  • Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt and .pptx)
  • Apple Pages (.page)
  • Apple Keynote (.key)
  • HTML (.html and .htm)
  • Rich Text Format (.rtf)
  • Audio (.mp3, .mp4, .m4a)

There’re three ways to open a file: from the Dropbox or Google Drive directly in Voice Dream Reader, using iTunes to move files from you PC or Mac, and from another app on your device.

The easiest way is to use Dropbox or Google Drive. First, go to Settings-Dropbox and enable access. After you authorize Voice Dream Reader access, from Voice Dream Reader you can open files by pushing the “+” button at the bottom of the Home screen and select Dropbox or Google Drive.

To move files using iTunes, open iTunes on your PC or Mac. Select your device under “Devices” on the left, and then click on “Apps” along the top. Scroll down to “File Sharing” section and you’ll find Voice Dream Reader in the list of App. Select it, and click on “Add..” button to the right to select the files to move to your device. Once the files are moved to Voice Dream Reader on your device, open Voice Dream Reader, tap “+” and “iTunes” to import the files.

The other way is to do it from another app. Many iPad and iPhone apps can open files: you’ve probably opened attachments in the Mail app. After you open the attachment, you’ll see the Action button at the top. The button looks like a box with an arrow coming out of it. Click on that, click on Open In… and select Voice Dream Reader. You can do this from any app that presents content with the Open In… option, such as Good Reader and box.net.

Either way, once you open the file, Voice Dream Reader will extract text from the file and store it in its own database. You’ll be able to listen to it offline, and you don’t need the original file any more.

You can download eBooks from Gutenberg for free directly from Voice Dream Reader. Press the “+” button from the Home screen and select Gutenberg. Navigate to the book you want, and select the “EPUB (no image) version to the book to download.

Finally, you can download eBooks from Bookshare, if you have a Bookshare account. You’ll first need to enter your user ID and password in Settings. Then, Bookshare will appear as an option when you press the “+” button.

Note: DRM-protected eBooks from iBooks, Kindle, Nook, Adobe OverDrive cannot be opened in Voice Dream Reader.

Note: If a DAISY book contains both audio and text, we only retain the text, since almost all full-text-full audio books use TTS.

Note: Besides supporting DAISY audiobooks, we also supports zipped MP3 files without an index. The ZIP file creates a single book item in Voice Dream. The name of the ZIP file becomes the title, and each MP3 file becomes a chapter with the name of the file as chapter name. Please make sure the file names are sorted in the same order as it appears in the book. Having a “track number” works great. For example, “01 Chapter 1.mp3”, “02 Chapter 2.mp3”, etc.

Back to the top

Loading Content from the Web

The easiest way to listen to a Web page is to use our built-in Browser. Click on the “+” button from the Home screen, and select Web Browser. The browser will pop up, and you can type in or paste an URL. You have two options to save the Web page: “Smart Save” and “Save All”. Smart Save tries to intelligently strip out the extraneous stuff on the Web page like menus and ads. Smart Save does not work on Web sites that requires you to log in and occasionally it could make mistakes. The other option is “Save All”, which saves all the text that appear on the Web page and works on Web sites that require logging-in. If you like, you can use the Editor to remove the text you don’t want.

If you rather use Safari, or another browser on your device, you can create a special bookmark to link it to Voice Dream. When you want to listen to a page, you can tap on the special bookmark, which would open Voice Dream and place the current web page in Voice Dream’s browser. At that point, you can do a “Smart Save” or “Save All” to extract text.

To create the special bookmark:

  • 1. Go to any Web page and tap on “Action” and “Bookmark” to create a bookmark. Put it in Favorites.
  • 2. Open up Bookmarks and find the page that contains the bookmark you just created. Tap on Edit.
  • 3. Tap the bookmark you just created. In the first field, give it a new name: “Open in Voice Dream”.
  • 4. In the second URL field, paste in the following:
    javascript:window.location=”com.voicedream.reader://open?url=”+window.location

You can also use a bookmarking service. If you already use Pocket (formerly Read It Later) or Instapaper, enter your user ID and password in Settings, and press the Refresh button in the Home screen to download unread articles.

For both services, Voice Dream Reader downloads “Unread” articles, and you can download the most recent 50, 100, 200, or 500 articles. If you have older articles on your device, they’ll be deleted from Voice Dream Reader (not from Pocket or Instapaper).

After you delete an article in Voice Dream Reader, the next refresh will move these articles to Archive in the cloud. Currently, Pocket supports the reverse: when you archive an article in Pocket, it will be deleted in Voice Dream Reader. This option can be turned on or off under Settings-Pocket.

Finally, you can Reset the connection in Settings-Pocket or Instapaper. Resetting will delete all articles in Voice Dream Reader and you’ll need to Refresh to download all the articles again.

Back to the top

Managing Content

Folders

Voice Dream Reader lets you use folders to manage your content. To see folders, click on the File Cabinet icon in the Home screen. (You can also click on the Title in the middle of the top bar). The File Cabinet first shows All Items and Playlist. If you enabled Pocket or Instapaper, it’ll show those also. These are special, system folders. You cannot edit them.

You can create you own folders, like “Books” or “Junk”. Press the “+” button the File Cabinet to create a folder. You can also rename folders or re-arrange them by pressing on the Edit button in the File Cabinet.

To move articles and books to a folder, you need to be in the Home screen. Press the Edit button all the way to the right, and you’ll enter Edit mode. Then, you can select the items by tapping on the them, and click on the Move button to move it to your own folder.

When you’re in Edit mode, pressing the Trash button permanently deletes the articles you selected. When you delete articles from Pocket or Instapaper, they’ll be marked “Read” or “Archived” there also. This works even if you’re offline; we mark these articles and tell Pocket and Instapaper about it the next time you Refresh. The “Unread” button moves the speech cursor to the beginning of the text.

You can sort the items in the current folder by Add Date, Title, Author, or Size. You can assign a different sort field for each folder.

A couple of neat iPad and iPhone features — many people don’t know about them — are very handy. One, you can swipe left on an item and the Delete button will pop up on that item. Two, you can tap on the thin status bar that shows battery life at the top to scroll to the top of the list.

Playlist

Playlist is a special folder. It’s special because one, you can pick any text item to include in your Playlist without moving them. Two, you can arrange the items in any order you like after you press the Edit button.. Three, if you remove an item from the Playlist, it is not deleted from the device permanently: it’s simply removed from the Playlist. Lastly, items in the Playlist are always played back-to-back.

Back to the top

Tips for VoiceOver Users

  • Full screen mode is disabled. In fact, when you turn VoiceOver on, Voice Dream automatically exists full-screen mode.
  • Focused Reading Mode is disabled.
  • To invoke the sleep timer, select the Play or Pause button first. Then, do a quick tap, followed by tap and hold.
  • To set the Navigation Unit on the fly using the rewind or fast forward button, use the same gesture of tap then tap and hold.
  • Voice Dream Reader scrolls automatically so that the line of text containing the speech cursor is always in the middle of the screen.
  • The Voice Settings button is the reader can be swiped up or down to quickly increase or decrease speech rate. There is no need to double tap and get into the Voice Setting screen.
  • The Play Or Pause button can be swiped up and down to rewind or fast forward.

Back to the top

[0-9]+:[0-9]+”. There’s many good RegEx tutorials on line if you’re interested in learning how to use this powerful technology.

Once a match is found using any of the matching options, you can tell Voice Dream Reader to skip all text that match, or to pronounce it as if it’s another piece of text. For example, you can pronounce “lol” as “laughing out loud”, or spell out “MAD” as “M-A-D”.

Back to the top

Loading Content from Files

Voice Dream Reader can open files with the following formats:

  • Adobe PDF (.pdf)
  • DRM-free EPUB eBooks (.epub)
  • DAISY text or audio books (.zip)
  • Plain Text (.txt and .text)
  • Microsoft Word (.doc and .docx)
  • Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt and .pptx)
  • Apple Pages (.page)
  • Apple Keynote (.key)
  • HTML (.html and .htm)
  • Rich Text Format (.rtf)
  • Audio (.mp3, .mp4, .m4a)

There’re three ways to open a file: from the Dropbox or Google Drive directly in Voice Dream Reader, using iTunes to move files from you PC or Mac, and from another app on your device.

The easiest way is to use Dropbox or Google Drive. First, go to Settings-Dropbox and enable access. After you authorize Voice Dream Reader access, from Voice Dream Reader you can open files by pushing the “+” button at the bottom of the Home screen and select Dropbox or Google Drive.

To move files using iTunes, open iTunes on your PC or Mac. Select your device under “Devices” on the left, and then click on “Apps” along the top. Scroll down to “File Sharing” section and you’ll find Voice Dream Reader in the list of App. Select it, and click on “Add..” button to the right to select the files to move to your device. Once the files are moved to Voice Dream Reader on your device, open Voice Dream Reader, tap “+” and “iTunes” to import the files.

The other way is to do it from another app. Many iPad and iPhone apps can open files: you’ve probably opened attachments in the Mail app. After you open the attachment, you’ll see the Action button at the top. The button looks like a box with an arrow coming out of it. Click on that, click on Open In… and select Voice Dream Reader. You can do this from any app that presents content with the Open In… option, such as Good Reader and box.net.

Either way, once you open the file, Voice Dream Reader will extract text from the file and store it in its own database. You’ll be able to listen to it offline, and you don’t need the original file any more.

You can download eBooks from Gutenberg for free directly from Voice Dream Reader. Press the “+” button from the Home screen and select Gutenberg. Navigate to the book you want, and select the “EPUB (no image) version to the book to download.

Finally, you can download eBooks from Bookshare, if you have a Bookshare account. You’ll first need to enter your user ID and password in Settings. Then, Bookshare will appear as an option when you press the “+” button.

Note: DRM-protected eBooks from iBooks, Kindle, Nook, Adobe OverDrive cannot be opened in Voice Dream Reader.

Note: If a DAISY book contains both audio and text, we only retain the text, since almost all full-text-full audio books use TTS.

Note: Besides supporting DAISY audiobooks, we also supports zipped MP3 files without an index. The ZIP file creates a single book item in Voice Dream. The name of the ZIP file becomes the title, and each MP3 file becomes a chapter with the name of the file as chapter name. Please make sure the file names are sorted in the same order as it appears in the book. Having a “track number” works great. For example, “01 Chapter 1.mp3”, “02 Chapter 2.mp3”, etc.

Back to the top

Loading Content from the Web

The easiest way to listen to a Web page is to use our built-in Browser. Click on the “+” button from the Home screen, and select Web Browser. The browser will pop up, and you can type in or paste an URL. You have two options to save the Web page: “Smart Save” and “Save All”. Smart Save tries to intelligently strip out the extraneous stuff on the Web page like menus and ads. Smart Save does not work on Web sites that requires you to log in and occasionally it could make mistakes. The other option is “Save All”, which saves all the text that appear on the Web page and works on Web sites that require logging-in. If you like, you can use the Editor to remove the text you don’t want.

If you rather use Safari, or another browser on your device, you can create a special bookmark to link it to Voice Dream. When you want to listen to a page, you can tap on the special bookmark, which would open Voice Dream and place the current web page in Voice Dream’s browser. At that point, you can do a “Smart Save” or “Save All” to extract text.

To create the special bookmark:

  • 1. Go to any Web page and tap on “Action” and “Bookmark” to create a bookmark. Put it in Favorites.
  • 2. Open up Bookmarks and find the page that contains the bookmark you just created. Tap on Edit.
  • 3. Tap the bookmark you just created. In the first field, give it a new name: “Open in Voice Dream”.
  • 4. In the second URL field, paste in the following:
    javascript:window.location=”com.voicedream.reader://open?url=”+window.location

You can also use a bookmarking service. If you already use Pocket (formerly Read It Later) or Instapaper, enter your user ID and password in Settings, and press the Refresh button in the Home screen to download unread articles.

For both services, Voice Dream Reader downloads “Unread” articles, and you can download the most recent 50, 100, 200, or 500 articles. If you have older articles on your device, they’ll be deleted from Voice Dream Reader (not from Pocket or Instapaper).

After you delete an article in Voice Dream Reader, the next refresh will move these articles to Archive in the cloud. Currently, Pocket supports the reverse: when you archive an article in Pocket, it will be deleted in Voice Dream Reader. This option can be turned on or off under Settings-Pocket.

Finally, you can Reset the connection in Settings-Pocket or Instapaper. Resetting will delete all articles in Voice Dream Reader and you’ll need to Refresh to download all the articles again.

Back to the top

Managing Content

Folders

Voice Dream Reader lets you use folders to manage your content. To see folders, click on the File Cabinet icon in the Home screen. (You can also click on the Title in the middle of the top bar). The File Cabinet first shows All Items and Playlist. If you enabled Pocket or Instapaper, it’ll show those also. These are special, system folders. You cannot edit them.

You can create you own folders, like “Books” or “Junk”. Press the “+” button the File Cabinet to create a folder. You can also rename folders or re-arrange them by pressing on the Edit button in the File Cabinet.

To move articles and books to a folder, you need to be in the Home screen. Press the Edit button all the way to the right, and you’ll enter Edit mode. Then, you can select the items by tapping on the them, and click on the Move button to move it to your own folder.

When you’re in Edit mode, pressing the Trash button permanently deletes the articles you selected. When you delete articles from Pocket or Instapaper, they’ll be marked “Read” or “Archived” there also. This works even if you’re offline; we mark these articles and tell Pocket and Instapaper about it the next time you Refresh. The “Unread” button moves the speech cursor to the beginning of the text.

You can sort the items in the current folder by Add Date, Title, Author, or Size. You can assign a different sort field for each folder.

A couple of neat iPad and iPhone features — many people don’t know about them — are very handy. One, you can swipe left on an item and the Delete button will pop up on that item. Two, you can tap on the thin status bar that shows battery life at the top to scroll to the top of the list.

Playlist

Playlist is a special folder. It’s special because one, you can pick any text item to include in your Playlist without moving them. Two, you can arrange the items in any order you like after you press the Edit button.. Three, if you remove an item from the Playlist, it is not deleted from the device permanently: it’s simply removed from the Playlist. Lastly, items in the Playlist are always played back-to-back.

Back to the top

Tips for VoiceOver Users

  • Full screen mode is disabled. In fact, when you turn VoiceOver on, Voice Dream automatically exists full-screen mode.
  • Focused Reading Mode is disabled.
  • To invoke the sleep timer, select the Play or Pause button first. Then, do a quick tap, followed by tap and hold.
  • To set the Navigation Unit on the fly using the rewind or fast forward button, use the same gesture of tap then tap and hold.
  • Voice Dream Reader scrolls automatically so that the line of text containing the speech cursor is always in the middle of the screen.
  • The Voice Settings button is the reader can be swiped up or down to quickly increase or decrease speech rate. There is no need to double tap and get into the Voice Setting screen.
  • The Play Or Pause button can be swiped up and down to rewind or fast forward.

Back to the top