I wrote a review of VoiceDream Reader on the app store after quitting and restarting the app for the fourth time in as many hours. I have complained a lot about this app, and it might be time to stop putting off the switch to Android for reading, or perhaps just go back to generating Eloquence audiobooks for the titles I want to read in text.
Sometimes I gain a lot of satisfaction from writing frustrated reviews about apps. This was not one of those times.
---------
Once upon a time, this was the gold standard of accessible reading. This app is the reason I stopped using an ancient reading device from 2003 that ran on AA batteries, used a very robotic-sounding voice, and required software that only runs on Windows XP. For a bookworm, it was life-changing. So it doesn't bring me joy to do this, in fact I've put it off for a long time. But my experience using this app has become so consistently frustrating that I don't know how much longer I can do it. I speak only for myself and the people I know who also use the app.
First, audiobooks, because it's simple: When I listen to a zipped audio book, VoiceDream occasionally skips entire chapters. I realized this when I had just started a new book and the app skipped from the end of chapter 1 to the beginning of chapter 3. It's very easy to miss this if you're not paying attention to chapter numbers, so if you find yourself confused often when reading audiobooks, you might want to check that you've actually listened to every audio file within the book. I stopped using it for audiobooks, so I don't know if this was fixed, but I heard another complaint about it in early 2026 so it would have to be a very recent fix.
When I read ebooks, the behaviour is very buggy in a complex way, and mostly seems to affect Bluetooth audio devices like AirPods. I'll just describe individual things that I experience, but it all seems to be linked back to some critical problem with the way it works.
I use system voices, specifically Eloquence.
If I pause the book from my AirPods and then immediately unpause it, nothing happens. As in, the book stays paused indefinitely. I have to go over to my phone and play it from there.
When I take out one AirPod and put it back in, the book resumes, even if it was previously paused. This is useful as a way of unpausing the book, but very annoying when I'm trying to do something else on my phone, I shift the position of my AirPod, and I suddenly hear the book I haven't been reading for three hours.
When I open the app after pausing from AirPods, the interface shows that the book is playing, even though it's not.
If I pause the book and leave the app in background, it doesn't let go of the audio device. I know this because I occasionally use hearing aids, which use a different sound profile when audio is being streamed to them over Bluetooth. When I pause my book, the hearing aids don't exit this mode until I force-quit VoiceDream on my phone. I also use a multipoint Bluetooth device which connects to more than one device, playing audio from only one at a time. Normally, when I pause Spotify or YouTube or a certain alternative reader app which is very EASY to use, I'm then able to interact with my Apple Watch and hear the audio through the headset. However, since VoiceDream never lets go of the audio device, I have to force-quit the app before I can use my watch. Multipoint is terrible and I don't blame VoiceDream for the way my headset works, but that behaviour does prove to me that VoiceDream is leaving the audio device open.
And lastly, sometimes VoiceDream seems to lose its handle on the audio playback and doesn't correctly account for it. So whether I use AirPods, the lock screen, or the play button in the app itself, my book simply will not play. This happens at least twice a week, and it just happened to me after I swapped from one pair of AirPods to the other, which is what prompted me to write this review. Once again, I had to force-quit VoiceDream before I could read my book again.
All of this results in a hilariously bad reading experience on Bluetooth, and the only reason I haven't ditched this app is because I still use wired headphones often. But when I don't, I have to pause and unpause from my phone, and if I forget to do that, I have to remove one of my AirPods for a couple of seconds and put it back in before my book will resume. And even then, it very often doesn't, leaving me to stop whatever I was doing, unlock my phone, and restart the app for the eleventeenth time that day.
I can confirm that many of these issues are more than six months old, but I binge-read several audiobook series in another app over the course of more than a year before switching back to VoiceDream in mid-2025, so I suspect many of the bugs described here have existed for much longer. I really enjoy this app, I used to have good email threads with its original developer, and I really hoped the acquisition would not result in longterm bugs like this, but these are reproducible, frequent, disruptive bugs. I sincerely hope this app gets better, because if the experience for others is anything like my own, it is in critical condition and on life support.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/topic/df986486-d357-40c0-b695-fc944b0218cd/i-wrote-a-review-of-voicedream-reader-on-the-app-store-after-quitting-and-restarting-the-app-for-the-fourth-time-in-as-many-hours.RSS for NodeFri, 17 Apr 2026 08:53:34 GMTThu, 16 Apr 2026 08:37:57 GMT60@simon What tool would you use to generate audio books with Eloquence?

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://dragonscave.space/users/johann/statuses/116414572339166661https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://dragonscave.space/users/johann/statuses/116414572339166661Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:16:43 GMT@pitermach @simon Answered my own question. It does have one, but it doesn't support regular expressions.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://dragonscave.space/users/jscholes/statuses/116414340500607084https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://dragonscave.space/users/jscholes/statuses/116414340500607084Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:17:45 GMT@pitermach @simon do you know offhand whether VL has a pronunciation dictionary?

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://dragonscave.space/users/jscholes/statuses/116414301360030651https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://dragonscave.space/users/jscholes/statuses/116414301360030651Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:07:48 GMT@simon I only use it now for audio books through GA so it's on the way out for me I think too. I mainly read epubs in paperback on my computer now.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://mastodon.online/users/sapphireangel/statuses/116413984221206329https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://mastodon.online/users/sapphireangel/statuses/116413984221206329Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:47:09 GMT@simon Have you tried vox libri for reading ebooks? I’ll admit I read more audio than text these days so it might have issues I’m not aware of but it seemed really good when I tried it

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://dragonscave.space/users/pitermach/statuses/116413543585838098https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://dragonscave.space/users/pitermach/statuses/116413543585838098Thu, 16 Apr 2026 08:55:05 GMT