If 22nd Century Software’s Speechify speaks, will anyone listen? I’m not sure.

Speechify is an app for the iPhone and iTouch that translates text into speech. Its voice quality is not quite as good as say, one of those talking greeting cards. It’s old-school, retro robotic, in other words.

I don’t know what to do with Speechify. You can type as much as you would like into Speechify and it will  repeat what you’ve written word-for-word. That is, when it works.

It took me several tries to activate it by tapping the Speak button. I tapped and pressed several times; entered and re-entered text; shut down and restarted my iPhone and it still didn’t work. And when it finally spoke, it was in a voice so low I could barely hear it, even with the volume control on my iPhone maxed out.

It speechifies, when it works, but what now?  It’s really not all that useful as far as I can see. The app doesn’t give you the option to save your text, either.

Speechify is free, thank goodness, given its quirks and limited use. It’s ad-supported, which wouldn’t bother me all that much if I could make use of this app.

22nd Century Software says in its app description that if this version of Speechify is “successful,” it will introduce a Pro version with more voices and without ad support. It’s not clear what the measure of success is.

Right now, Speechify is gimmicky rather than useful. That’s about all I’m going to say about it.

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category: Entertainment