Recently, a user asked me how to access a poorly scanned PDF from the Internet Archive. The pages themselves were readable, but extracting the text produced mostly garbage. At first, this sounds like a straightforward OCR problem: if a PDF contains scanned images instead of text, run optical character recognition (OCR) on it. But this…
Siri AI can now control third-party apps through Apple’s App Intents system, and Speech Central’s Siri AI integration is now live on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. After testing it with the iOS 27 Release Candidate, we learned that Siri’s third-party app integration works somewhat differently from what the earlier App Intents schemas suggested. Speech Central…
Pocket TTS is now available on iPhone and iPad through ToBe SAID, bringing another modern offline AI system voice engine to iOS. Until recently, Pocket TTS was available through ToBe SAID on Android and then on macOS, but not on iPhone. That has now changed. The new iOS version of ToBe SAID brings Pocket TTS…
Earlier this year, we looked at ToBe SAID on Android, one of the first practical attempts to bring modern Pocket TTS voices directly into the operating system as an offline text-to-speech engine. Now the same idea has arrived on the Mac. ToBe SAID is now available for macOS on the Mac App Store, bringing Pocket…
Speech Central has long supported both on-device and cloud text-to-speech voices. That has given users a choice between speech generated directly on their phone and more sophisticated voices generated on remote servers. Until recently, however, comparing the environmental impact of those two approaches did not seem particularly meaningful. The reason was simple: voice quality. When…
Recently, Speech Central adopted the headline “For serious reading.” It may sound like a great promotional headline, but above all, it describes the app. It means that the app’s toolset is wide and deep. It means that I have spent more than a decade understanding different user needs and finding solutions to the sometimes opposing…
Speech Central was first released on Windows in 2014, with a Windows Phone version following soon afterward. In fact, Windows is where Speech Central began. Since then, the app has expanded to iOS, macOS and Android, which eventually became its leading platforms. Today, the situation is unusual: Speech Central for Windows remains available and fully…
If you have ever selected a Siri voice on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac and then wondered why the same voice is not available in your favorite text-to-speech app, there is a simple — if somewhat frustrating — answer: Apple does not allow third-party apps to use Siri voices through its standard text-to-speech API. This…
Which third-party apps are compatible with Siri AI? Speech Central is among the early apps to implement Apple’s new App Intents schemas—the technology that enables Siri AI to understand supported app content and actions through natural language. Speech Central currently implements Apple’s system-defined audiobook schemas for both discovering reading items and playing them: .books.audiobook for…
Reading before bed has long been a familiar way to relax at the end of the day. A book, article, or other piece of writing can shift your attention away from unfinished tasks and daily distractions. The difficulty is that conventional reading requires you to keep your eyes open, hold a device or book, and…
