Using the Voice Dream Reader App
iFocus@Hadley
Using the Voice Dream Reader App
Presented by
Douglas Walker
November 16, 2016
Douglas Walker
Hello, my name is Douglas Walker. Today, we are going to be checking out our Voice Dream Reader app. We will be using our iPhone for today's demonstration. I'll tell you, the Voice Dream Reader app really has evolved so much since its first release. It has really become my go-to must-have text-to-speech, and digital book reading app.
A couple of my favorite features of the Voice Dream Reader app is, first, the numerous ways that we have for getting content or text into our app for reading. One way is the ability to import files directly from our Dropbox app, which is really beyond great for me because I am a huge Dropbox user.
We can also import files sent to us in an email or even in a text message. I really like the fact that Voice Dream Reader has a built-in Bookshare interface that allows us to search for and download Bookshare files directly into our app.
Anyone that uses Bookshare knows what a fantastic service it is for us that have a print disability. You know, we have so many ways for getting content into our Voice Dream Reader app and we won't have time to cover every single one of them today; however, we will check out a couple of the most common, including importing from an email attachment and importing from our Bookshare interface here.
Now, another thing that I really, really like about this app is the wide array of tools that we have right at our fingertips. We have the ability to highlight, bookmark and of course, easily navigate through our texts. Again, there is just so much to the Voice Dream Reader app and we'll do our best to cover as much as we are able in the short amount of time that we have for today's video.
First things first, I'm sure that we're curious as to what the Voice Dream Reader app is going to cost us. Well, we can download the Voice Dream Reader app from Apple's App Store at a cost of $9.99. At first glance, that might seem a bit pricey; however, after spending a lot of money on numerous text-to-speech apps, for me, I'll tell you, it really is worth the price.
How about we jump right in and we'll check out exactly what the Voice Dream Reader app can do for us? Okay, so let's go ahead and launch our Voice Dream Reader app. We have it right here on our desktop, so we'll go ahead and just flick to it, so we'll just flick to it. Great, and there it is, so we'll just need to single-finger double-tap to open it. And we can single-finger double-tap anywhere on our screen here. All right, now when we first open Voice Dream Reader, we are placed right on our home screen. However, many apps refer to this as our bookshelf. If this is the first time that we're actually opening or launching Voice Dream Reader, we will be presented with a welcome screen dialogue. This dialogue will have a Next button up here in the top right-hand corner for us. We'll use that to progress right through it.
Now, one of the things that we will be prompted to do is to download new voice data. So, we'll need to do that. A great feature of our Voice Dream Reader app is the fact that we're able to download really high quality voices for reading our text. We'll be using one of these voices today called Sally, which we're going to hear a little bit later on. Now, the reason that we are mentioning this is because we're given the choice to download these voices as we move through our welcome dialogue.
Okay, so we're going to have to pay a little extra for these new voices and their prices range from anywhere from $1.99 to $4.99 apiece. If we want to skip purchasing from within our welcome dialogue that pops up, that's fine, because we always have the ability to purchase them later from within our Settings menu. We won't be going through this welcome dialogue today but it's good to know that it's there when we first open our app for the first time.
Okay, so as we said earlier, we have been placed right on our home screen here, or we're going to call this our bookshelf at times. Now, we're going to begin by totally exploring this home screen or this bookshelf because this is where we will come to find all of our content that we have imported. Of course, this is where we'll find all of our tools for importing additional content and also for changing some of our settings. So, let's get started exploring this home screen here.
All right, so when our home screen first opens, we are typically placed on our Add button on the top left corner of our screen, and that is exactly where we happen to be. Now, single-finger double-tapping right here on this Add button will open a dialogue box and give us a lot of options for importing our files. How about we check it out, and we'll just single-finger double-tap here to check it out. Okay, our dialogue box, or what Apple likes to call a pop-up menu here, has opened.
Now, we've been placed right on our Add Document heading here in the top center of this pop-up menu. We've been given some really great ways below in our little pop-up here for adding content to our app, so let's go ahead and just right-flick through our pop-up menu here and we'll check out these different ways that we have for adding our digital content.
So, let's just right-flick and we will just flick to the right. Okay, here we have our Close button and of course, activating our Close button here will simply close this pop-up menu. Now, we don't want that, so we will just continue to right-flick here. Good, so here we have our iCloud button and if we were to activate this iCloud button, we would be presented with a list of all of our iCloud files and we could just flick through and select any of our iCloud text files and download them right into our Voice Dream Reader app right here. I'll tell you, it really is super easy.
Now, it's important to know that our iCloud button, our Dropbox button and our Bookshare buttons here will not appear in this Add Document pop-up menu until we enable Voice Dream Reader to actually access these apps. We're going to see exactly where to do this on our More button at the bottom of this pop-up menu in just a minute.
For now, we're just going to go ahead and right-flick through this. Great, so here's our Clipboard button. If we have saved any text from any of our other apps or copied text from any of our other apps, activating this Clipboard button will give us access to our saved text, and we can just import it right into our files list here. That's pretty handy for us. Okay, so let's go ahead and just right-flick here.
Great, we have been placed on our Dropbox button here. If we were to single finger double-tap here, just like our iCloud button, all of our Dropbox folders or files will all open for us and we would just right and left-flick through them to select a text file that we want to import right into our list here. That's pretty great.
You know, if you're interested in learning more of how to use Dropbox, well then you might want to check out our "Using Dropbox" video. Of course, after you're finished with this one. Okay, so let's check out the rest of our dialogue box here for importing our files. So, we'll just right-flick again. Okay, so here is our Bookshare button that we mentioned earlier. Again, if this isn't showing up in your Add list, remember, we'll see how to add iCloud, Bookshare and Dropbox in just a bit, and we'll do that by using our More button here.
Bookshare is a super resource for people that have a print disability. If you're not a Bookshare member yet, you can check out how to become one by going to or you could get a free Bookshare membership by becoming a Hadley student, which is pretty great.
Okay, so activating our Bookshare button is going to bring up our Bookshare interface; however, we're not going to explore this just yet. We will come back here and we'll check out how to import some content. For now, let's just right-flick. So, we'll right-flick through the rest of this list here. Okay, so here's our More button and of course, we've mentioned that a couple of times now.
Activating this More button will give us a list of content sources that we can simply right-flick through and select from. Of course, once we select them, they're going to appear right here in our Add Document pop-up menu that we have, so that's pretty great. Now, we're not going to check out this More button because you're really going to want to take your time going through it and select the types of content sources that work best for you. For now, we're going to close this Add Document dialogue and we're going to explore the rest of our Bookshelf, our Home screen interface here.
We could just perform our scrub gesture if we like to close this pop-up; however, let's just go ahead and left-flick back to our Close button. We'll quickly just left-flick back through this, I'll flick to the left several times, keep flicking here. Great, and of course, that's our Close button. So, we'll just single-finger double-tap to close our pop-up menu here. So, we'll just single-finger double-tap. Okay, so our pop-up menu has closed for us and we have been placed right back on our Add button in the top left corner of our screen here. So, let's go ahead and just right-flick there.
Great, so here we are on our Filter button in the top center of our screen and we heard our Filter button announce that we are currently filtering our content here by all items. That means that anything that we've downloaded to our device, all of our content is going to be listed below here in our Bookshelf. Our filter button is in the top center here. It's right where we would typically find our heading. We've been placed in the top center of our screen and just below the Time in our status bar here.
Now, activating this Filter button will give us a ton of different ways for displaying our content here. We could choose to display by all items like we have here. We can display by flagged items or unread items. We could display them here by source, like Bookshare or Dropbox, or we could even display our content here by our different folders. I'm all about staying organized, so it is really great that we have the ability to create different folders for separating all of our different types of content. If we were to activate our Folders button, we would be given a list of all our folders, then we could just flick through them and choose the folder that we want.
I'll tell you, creating folders really is a great way for helping us to keep all of our content organized in this. Now, we're not going to totally explore this Filter feature here but it's really nice to know that we have the ability to organize all of our content in so many different ways. Okay, so let's just continue now to right-flick through our home screen here. Let's go ahead and just right-flick. All right, so here we are on our Edit button and that just so happens to be in the top right-hand corner of our screen here. Activating our Edit button here is going to give us several options. We'll have the ability to select items that we want to move to another folder perhaps. We're also given the ability to mark items as unread and we also have the option to delete single or multiple items from our list.
We aren't going to explore these Edit features; however, if we were to activate this button, all of our Edit options are going to be presented to us in tabs across the bottom edge of our screen here. Now, I mentioned that this Edit button here gives us the ability to delete files; however, we will take a look at a much faster and easier way to delete single files from our list here in just a bit.
Okay, so let's go ahead and just right-flick from here. All right, we've now been placed in our Search field and we are just, of course, below our heading here and we're at the top of our list of files in our Bookshelf here. This Search field gives us the ability to search through all of our files and even through our folders, if we've created them. This can be really great, especially if we've imported a lot of files, so that's pretty cool.
Okay, so we only have three files that are in our Bookshelf right now and if we right-flick again, we'll be on the first file here in our list. Now, when we do right-flick and land on our first file, we're going to be given the title, we'll be told the length of our file, we'll be told the percentage of the file that has already been read, and we will be told the file format or the format of the type of file that it is. I usually pause my speech so I don't have to hear all this information every time; however, we're going to let this first file kind of play out because after our file format is given, we will be told a hint for a really handy action feature gesture.
So, how about we go ahead and just right-flick here and we'll see what we have? So, we'll just right-flick. All right, so this is a help file, or I guess it's named, "Getting Started File," here. Now, you're really going to want to come and activate this file later on, on your own and explore it, because this file is going to give you all of the gestures that you're going to need for being able to successfully navigate the text in your files. Like I said, you'll really want to come back and read this file.
Now, this is a file that comes pre-loaded in our app when we download it. As a matter of fact, all three files that we have here will come pre-loaded in our Bookshelf. Just like we stated earlier, Voiceover announced our title here, which is Quick Start. We were then given the length of our file, which is only 1 minute and 33 seconds. We were told that we were at a zero percent read, so we haven't even started reading this. And we were told that this is an EPUB file and then Voiceover gave us our action feature hint. Voiceover announced that we could swipe up or down to choose a custom action and thatwe could then double-tap to active.
This is exactly what we were talking about earlier when we were discussing an easy way to delete our files. Remember, our hints told us that we could swipe up or down to choose a custom action. How about we just go ahead and try that? Now, we could flick up or we could flick down, like I said, to cycle through all of these custom actions. So, how about we just flick up this time? We'll go ahead and just flick up.
Okay, so Voiceover announced, "Delete," and now all we would need to do is just single-finger double-tap to delete this file here, which we can see is a super easy way to delete our files. Now, if we don't want to delete this file here, and we don't, we would just flick up again to move to our next custom action here. So, let's just flick up our screen again, and we'll flick up. Great, so this is another great action for us. We could just single-finger double-tap here and we would quickly move to the beginning of our book or file, in this case.
Okay, so it's pretty easy to see how nice it is to have our action features here. How about we just flick up again and we'll check out our next action here? So, we'll flick up. Okay, and Voiceover announced, "Flag," so we could just double-tap to flag this file. Then we could have it listed by choosing our flagged content, remember that filter button that we saw earlier in the top center here. Okay, so how about we just flick up again and we'll just flick up our screen.
Super, so here we have an action that will help us quickly move our file to a folder that we've created or a folder of our choosing here, so that's pretty great as well. We only have, I think, one more quick action, so let's just flick up one more time. Okay, and here we are, we've cycled through all of our actions and here we are back on our default action.
Now, if we were to just single-finger double-tap our file, our Getting Started file would open and we would be placed right in our Reader for reading it, so that’s pretty great. However, we don't want to open this file just yet because we're going to go ahead and explore the rest of our home screen here. Of course, we'll then check out our Reader screen, let's just right-flick here. So, we're just going to right-flick through these other two files that we have and then we're going to check our additional options that we have at the bottom of our screen here.