Voice Book Reader

Windows comes with a built-in narrator that enables users to read text out loud from any running program, such as a browser or a document viewer. However, it is a Windows function and not a standalone application. This means that, for instance, you also need an e-book reader to have EPUB files read out loud to you. So why not have it all in a single package? Conveniently, Voice Book Reader brings together a text-to-speech application for text files, EPUB e-books and PDF documents.

Working with Voice Book Reader is pretty straightforward. The application is designed in Electron, sporting a minimalistic interface that allows you to create a list of supported files, at first. On the downside, once you create this list, you cannot add new items to it. When you try to, the old list is replaced by the newly selected files, which is quite annoying.

To open a document, you simply have to select it. Voice Book Reader can load regular text files, e-books in EPUB format and PDFs, which means you can also use it as a document viewer for all these formats.

The PDF viewer can open multi-page documents, providing easy-to-use navigation tools, zoom options and full–screen reading mode.

When opening e-books, you will notice that selecting a word displays itss dictionary explanation and synonyms, which is quite useful.

A side panel allows you to browse the table of contents, to search within the book and change the text style to your liking. The font, the text size, the line spacing, the margins are all customizable parameters. Moreover, Voice Book Reader displays a progress bar and comes with full-screen mode and both white and black themes to facilitate reading during nighttime.

Voice Book Reader can open the aforementioned file formats, but its original purpose is to be a text-to-speech application. The Settings window shelters options to select the voice to use and adjust the volume and the pitch.

As the application reads out loud, it also highlights the text, so reading along with the voice is comfortable. The color of the highlighter is customizable.

While intended to be a text-to-speech application, Voice Book Reader comes with more features for viewing text files, e-books and PDFs. Reading text out loud seems more like a secondary function to a software tool designed as a file viewer. Nevertheless, being able to open all three formats using the same application is definitely a plus.