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…
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…
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…
Speech Central has always had an edge in areas that mattered to its users. From its earliest versions, the app solved problems that other text-to-speech applications did not, and that is how it attracted its first users and continued to grow. At the same time, some aspects of the early experience were less refined than…
The latest version of Speech Central introduces a significant change to how bedtime listening works. The familiar Sleep Timer and Night Mode have been combined into a single feature called Sleep Assistant. This update is being rolled out across supported platforms. If you have used previous versions of the app, here is what has changed…
When Apple unveiled iOS 27 at WWDC 2026 and released the first developer betas in June, many accessibility advocates and text-to-speech users hoped for major improvements. Historically, the first developer betas provide a strong indication of what will be included in the final release, even though some refinements typically arrive before the public launch in…
Text-to-speech (TTS) is evolving rapidly across iPhone, Mac, and Android devices. With the introduction of xAI-powered voices, users now have access to a more natural, flexible, and cost-effective speech experience. Speech Central as an Open Voice Platform Speech Central is designed as an open voice platform, giving users full control over their text-to-speech ecosystem. Instead…
