NaturalreadersReviews of naturalreaders.com

Up until a couple of weeks ago, Natural Reader was the perfect compromise. The free version offered unlimited voices that were actually good — in particular, the Italian voice Giuseppe, which was genuinely pleasant to listen to. There were some minor issues with sentence breaks and occasional awkward pauses, but overall the experience was solid, especially considering it was a free plan. As often happens, though, good things don’t last. With the latest update, all voices except two (the basic, robotic Windows ones) are now locked behind a subscription. Meanwhile, the other limitations remain: no OCR for free users, clunky sentence parsing, and the same reading issues as before. At this point, I’d rather use Speechify. The free voices are comparable, but at least it offers OCR and reads text more smoothly. And if I were to pay for a subscription, I would still choose Speechify without hesitation. A real pity — this change will likely cost them a significant amount of traffic.

I hate to complain because the customer service started out nice and friendly. But service has deteriorated over the last year. Sure, there were some glitches, but the voices were great for the most part and worked well and there was a wide variety. The problem is the voice search function. It seldom brings up the voice that I am looking for, and the problem has gotten much worse over time. The search option apparently filters based on categories that are hidden in search mode -- so you never know if you're searching with the appropriate filters. Besides, they should let you search without filters. There are many voices that are technically foreign but which speak English too, often without an accent. Yet to make them appear in search, you apparently have to remember what their original language was. Likewise with English voices -- it may be English UK or English OTHER or English Australia, and it sometimes won't find voices unless you know which one. For the most part though, it just does not find or list all the voices anymore, even though the number of voices has grown enormously. And there is also a set of categories like "Trending now," that appear to be filters, but there is no way to say "search everything." So it is totally unclear what the search is looking for when I type in a voice name. Is it limited to "trending male voices" and "English UK" or is it ignoring the trending category and set -- unbeknownst to me -- to English US? -- and does it make a difference? It's impossible to tell and the staff does not seem to know either. Unless there is a big improvement, I will have to go elsewhere before my year contract expires in April 2026. This problem may be less apparent to those who aren't trying to use the same voices consistently for a variety of projects, but it's become so hard to find a full list of voices and to find a given voice by name that I surely can't be the only one having problems.

Very disappointed in this app now days it used to be good and even the free model would work I think it's absolutely disgusting that you have to pay just to use this app.

Natural Reader struggles (skips over) most text that is in a bullet list on websites. Not what you expect for £50.