As a teacher, I realise how difficult it is for students to pick up a correct accent when they speak. The main problem here is that when you want to memorise something in French for instance and you read it, you read it as an English speaker would do, applying the pronunciation rules of one language to another. And it simply does not work.
What Speak4Me does is to read the text aloud to you, with the correct pronunciation rules.
iOS comes bundled with a beautiful Text-To-Speech (TTS) engine which is easy to put in place, does not need a network connection to work, so it looked like a better choice than using the online readers.
The current features are:
- it supports all the languages supported by the iOS TTS Engine, as well as Right To Left scripts (like English) and Left To Righ scripts (like Arabic). Basically, if you can paste some text into Speak4Me, it will read it.
- it saves your texts for later retrieval.
- you can pause, resume and stop the reading at any time
- you can change the pitch, speed, volume and voice for the TTS Engine, and make it read text from a language using the pronunciation rules of another language. Very funny but very insightful too.
- and its free and will always be.