Today Alana.sh released Heard, a free EPUB ereader for iOS that includes decent on-device text to speech. The app includes 50+ free books and does not require an account to read and listen for free. Once you open a book, you can hit play to trigger a one-time download of a 350 MB neural voice model. Then, you can read along as the app reads to you and turns pages automatically, or you can simply read and turn the pages yourself.
The books included for free are: A Christmas Carol, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A Doll’s House, A Room with a View, A Tale of Two Cities, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Anna Karenina, Anne of Green Gables, Around the World in Eighty Days, Beowulf, Crime and Punishment, Don Quixote, Dracula, Emma, Frankenstein, Great Expectations, Gulliver’s Travels, Heart of Darkness, Jane Eyre, Les Misérables, Little Women, Middlemarch, Moby Dick, Oliver Twist, Peter Pan, Pride and Prejudice, Robinson Crusoe, Romeo and Juliet, Sense and Sensibility, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Blue Castle, The Call of the Wild, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Enchanted April, The Great Gatsby, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Iliad, The Importance of Being Earnest, The King in Yellow, The Metamorphosis, The Odyssey, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Scarlet Letter, The Secret Garden, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Three Musketeers, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Treasure Island, Twenty Years After, and Wuthering Heights.
Heard Pro (subscription) allows you to import your own EPUB files and choose between multiple neural voices.
