• Available in 5 languages (US English, UK English, American Spanish, Canadian French and German)
• 2 Different voices currently available for US English (Paul and Kate)
• 2 Versions available for higher-powered and lower-powered devices (16MB and 32MB versions)

• Provides exceptional voice quality for mobile devices

• Can vocalize web pages using the built-in browser and documents such as Word Mobile docs
• Provides control over voice properties such as pitch, speed, volume, etc.

"NO 9000 COMPUTER HAS EVER MADE A MISTAKE OR DISTORTED INFORMATION"
Let's take a look at the application itself.

Figure 1: Here is the screen you are presented with upon starting the application.

The starting screen is also a quick reference screen which mimics a lot of the information found at the product page on Digital Future Software's website. Having a quick reference guide is always a nice thing, but in this case I would have preferred that the application started with a wizard of some kind asking you what you wanted to do. You will also notice right away that this application does not support Windows Mobile 5 soft keys.

Figure 2: Click the "Home" link as seen at the top of Figure 1 and you go to the detailed help contents.

Figure 3: Here are some of the help screen's contents.

Clicking a "Home" icon and being taken to the help contents is not exactly intuitive nor was it what I was expecting. Here again would have been a great place for a wizard to assist in choosing what you want spoken. The good news is that if you are intending on going to a web page, you can enter the URL directly into the address bar at the top of the program.

Figure 4: Unfortunately, all of the web browser control functions are hidden away in a menu which is accessed by tapping the (very) small down arrow to the right of the address bar.

The placement of the web browser controls really inhibits using this as your primary web browser.

Figure 5: The file menu offers a variety of choices.

The file menu allows you to open up another browser window or a new document. I am not sure why you would want to open another browser window since there is no way to get back to a previous one... Pocket Internet Explorer (PIE) which this web browser is based upon does not support tabbed browsing like NetFront does.

Figure 6: The voice menu is where you can access the application settings and speech commands.

Figure 7: From the settings screen you can adjust many properties of the voice functionality.

I like and appreciate the amount of control the application provides over the voice. Having the application highlight which word is being spoken is cool in a karaoke sort of way. You can also manually place XML tags into the document you would like spoken to control functions such as pitch, speed, volume, voice and pause. This is handy if you want to change these options at various places in your document. Alternately, you can adjust these from the settings screen for the entire application.

At the bottom of the settings screen, there is a tab that reads "Voice Settings." If you look at Figure 7 you will see that this is the only tab on the settings screen. In addition, the top of the screen clearly states that you are in "TextSpeech Pro Voice Settings." This leads me to ask why is the tab there taking up valuable real estate? Unfortunately, the application is full of items like this that lead to an overall feeling that the application was not well thought through.

"I'M SORRY DAVE, I'M AFRAID I CAN'T DO THAT"
Let's get TextSpeech Pro to do some yapping. In the web browser, you highlight text and then click the "play" button or select "Voice" > "Speak / Pause / Resume." The key here is that you have to highlight text for anything to be read from the web browser. I would have preferred to have an option where you just click "play" and the application starts to read the entire web page.

Figure 8: You cannot just click "play" or "Speak" from a webpage without highlighting the text you want spoken.

Also, the "Speak / Pause / Resume" menu function should adjust itself based on the application's current state. In other words, if nothing is being spoken, the menu option should only say "Speak." While speech is in progress, the menu option should read, "Pause." You get the idea. Just another little user interface detail that was missed.

Unfortunately, just getting a document to be read seemed to be an issue on my Treo 700w. Every time I tried to open a .doc file (that TextSpeech Pro itself created on the device, no less!) I was faced with one of two situations:

Figure 9: In this case, the file opened in Word Mobile.

Even though the file opened in Figure 8 above, I was in Word Mobile and there are no commands for TextSpeech Pro anywhere to be found! The only way that I was able to get the document spoken in this scenario was to copy all the text to the clipboard, go into TextSpeech Pro, select the file menu, select New Document and then paste all the text there. This is NOT user-friendly. Another problem... TextSpeech Pro takes at least 4-5MB of available program memory. On my Treo, every time I opened a document, Windows Mobile closed TextSpeech Pro. Granted, this is the fault of the Treo for having so little memory. That being said, if TextSpeech Pro would simply open the selected document from within itself instead of launching Word Mobile, this would not have happened.

The second situation involved not even being able to get the .doc file to open.

Figure 10: In this situation, the file would not even open.

Speaking of opening files, for some reason Digital Future Software decided to create their own open file screen instead of conforming to the Windows Mobile standard. Another little detail that negatively impacts the user experience.

Figure 11: Not the best open file screen I have ever seen.

Figure 12: Another detail... the open file screen does not filter out file types that it cannot open.

Figure 13: I tried to open a .pmi file (PhatPad) and I received this error message.

Figure 14: Apparently, the first error message was not enough admonishment so the application displays a second error screen to really let you know it is unhappy.

Now, obviously I did not expect TextSpeech Pro to open a PhatPad file. Most users however, will not know what .pmi, .opml, .rss, etc. files are. Since TextSpeech Pro knows what kind of files it can read, it should filter the others out in the open file screen. Another detail...

"JUST WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING, DAVE?"
Once you actually get TextSpeech Pro to talk, the voice quality is truly incredible. I was expecting something that sounded like Microsoft Voice Command (which isn't bad), but TextSpeech Pro sounds about 10 times more natural. This was with the 16MB version of the software... the 32MB version would not run on my memory-constrained Treo. The 32k version should sound even more amazing. On the same note, the 16MB version will need 20MB of storage space (why don't they just call it the 20MB version?) and the 32MB version will require a lot more. Yes, you can install it to a storage card.

Speaking of installing, the desktop installer would not complete the installation process. I think this is because of the size of the application. Fortunately, you can also download a .CAB file, copy it over to the storage card and install from there.

Of course, since TextSpeech Pro is a rather large program, it ran very slowly on my Treo. Even web browsing from within the application seemed to be 4-5 times slower than just using PIE natively. I am sure that the program would perform better on a higher-powered Windows Mobile device, but I did not have one available to test on. Even so, there is no reason why this program should not be able to perform decently on the Treo. Every time I ran the program, I made sure that it was after a soft reset with at least 10-11MB free. I think 11MB of free program memory should be enough. Also, while the Treo does not have the fastest processor on the block, there are other devices with slower processors. This is especially important because Digital Future Software says on their website that TextSpeech Pro will run on Pocket PC 2002, Windows Mobile 2003/2003 SE and Windows Mobile 5 ARM-based devices. There should be a more detailed list of system requirements on their website to provide a better idea of what kind of device this will run smoothly on.

Besides the performance issues and user interface issues, I just do not see why this application would be useful to anyone. I was hoping you could combine Microsoft Voice Command and TextSpeech Pro into a complete voice solution where you could tell the device to open a webpage and then use TextSpeech Pro to read it to you. Or do the same with a Word Mobile file. Alas, there was no joy to be had there. TextSpeech Pro relies much too heavily on the stylus and completely ignores any semblance of one-handed use which eliminates more usage scenarios. Since you have to use the stylus for so much, the application wouldn't be useful for someone who was visually impaired, which was another usage scenario I thought about. I thought about this for several weeks and I simply cannot come up with a single realistic usage scenario for this application. If you can come up with one, I'd love to read about it in the comments thread for this review.

TextSpeech Pro seems like a proof of concept and a solution in search of a problem.

PURCHASING

PROS

• Truly amazing voice quality
• Can read web page text
• Can read pasted text from other documents
• Lots of control over the voice settings

CONS

• MANY user interface gaffs
• Problems opening Word Mobile docs
• Must highlight text in a web page for it to be spoken
• No attempt at one-handed usage or WM5 soft key implementation
• Very expensive for a handheld application
• Memory-hungry

OVERALL IMPRESSION