Docs to Speech

Listen to your your office documents, books, articles and research papers while you drive, run, or walk the dog.  Use it to proof-read your papers.

Supported formats:
Text files (txt)
Portable Document Format (pdf)
Electronic books (ePub) (DRM eBooks not supported)
Web pages
Images with text (jpeg,png)

OCR:  reads scanned documents and pictures with text on PDF documents.  Also take a picture of a document and extract the text from the picture.

Website-to-Speech:  Docs-to-Speech can read website pages.  In three simple steps:  press and hold the URL on the browser, select share option, select Docs-to-Speech.  In a few seconds the app starts to read the article.

Download and save your PDF files and plain text file Attachments from the gmail app and other apps.  The downloaded file is placed in the Download folder.

Highlighted text-to-speech tool:  on Gingerbread and up (2.3), highlight text, press share and select Pdf-to-speech to listen to the phone/tablet read the text.

Replace Text tool:  Replace words or phrases to avoid repetitive, unnecessary phrases.  Use it to replace foreign words with more phonetic alternatives.  Use it to omit symbols.  It can also be used to replace names or words with funny substitutes.

Support for SVOX, IVONA text-to-Speech and other High Fidelity text-to-speech synthesizers.

Support for OI Manager as well as other file managers.


PERMISSIONS EXPLAINED:
At Practical Android Apps, we value your privacy.  Here is the explanation of the permissions Docs-to-Speech uses:

System tools:  This allows the app to continue reading even if the phone falls asleep (similar to your media player).

Phone Calls:  This allows the reader to stop reading if the handset is up, and to continue reading when the handset is down.  The app only knows if the handset "is up," "is down" or "is ringing"

Storage:  To access documents located in the phone.

Your Account: enables the cloud feature which includes OCR for pictures with text or Pdf's that also have pictures with text.  Google Docs word documents access is requested.

Network communication:  Used for the Web-to-speech feature.  The app uses pdfmyurl (www.pdfmyurl.com).  Also used for the web search feature.

Note:
Android 1.6 Donut no longer supported.  Use pdf-to-speech legacy for Donut.