Story

TTS trained exclusively on public domain audio that runs on your computer, so there are no outages like cloud-based alternatives. Reliable, works across many different types of web pages including PDFs, with word-by-word highlighting, option to read any selected text, and auto-next page navigation which makes reading entire textbooks as easy as 1 click. I built this app because as a full-time college student I needed to read several different online textbooks and there was nothing that existed that could read all of them in natural voices reliably (massive internet outages as of late caused the only available voices to be robotic at certain times), not to mention the extra nice features I added on (and the more I plan to add in the future). Most TTS apps have a tradeoff between speed and audio quality, which is why they either need to be ran in data centers or sound robotic. BetterTTS uses extremely efficient processing to ensure you can run it on your own machine without making any compromises, resulting in 40+ natural sounding voices that can be ran on most consumer desktops faster than real time even when playing at 2.0x speed. You can skip ahead or skip backwards on a page (or skip between pages on PDFs) while it's reading by playing with the buttons on the bottom or by selecting any word and continuing from that exact point. It uses sophisticated logic (if you're interested, the reason it needs a dedicated native app instead of fully running in the browser is because the full model requires more memory than a browser is allowed to run in its sandbox) to ensure the audio chunk you want to play is always processed first so that it feels snappy no matter what. I poured my soul into this as a solo dev over the last 7 months while also being a full-time student in college so please give it a try and a review on the Microsoft store would be greatly appreciated. Any other feedback is also tremendously helpful and can be written here or sent to me directly at bettertts.help@gmail.com. There is a 1-week free trial to try out the app risk-free and if you don't cancel it, after that is a monthly subscription for $1.99 per month but this special launch sale offer ends on 2/28 so if you want to lock in that price forever you have to act quick (but if you cannot afford even this for a good reason you can email me and I may offer you a promo code to access it free for life with continuous updates free as well). By the way I am working on releasing a version for MacOS very soon which will take advantage of the Apple Silicon hardware to achieve even greater efficiency (up to ~11x faster than real time speed tested on my base M2 Mac Mini, with the exact same audio quality)