André Polykanine

I received the following announcement via email from Adi Kushnir of AccessMind. Although Adi's signature states that the announcement is only meant for the intended recipient and cannot be distributed, Adi has assured me that this announcement can be shared.

Announcing the first public beta of Runa TTS: bringing the high quality, natural sounding voices from ReadSpeaker to VoiceOver and other apps that rely on Apple's speech synthesis API's.
Dear Apple users community,
AccessMind is proud to announce the first public beta of Runa TTS, a new text-to-speech engine for iOS that brings high quality, natural sounding, neural voices from ReadSpeaker, a global pioneer in the field of human-like TTS technology, to be used with VoiceOver, as well as other applications that use Apple's speech synthesis APIs.
Enjoy classics such as Paul, Kate and Julie from the Neo speech days, or new voices in 50 languages, including English, Arabic, Hebrew, French, German, Spanish, and many others.
The application also includes some advanced features, such as:
• Voice Profiles, allowing you to configure various settings such as speech rate, pitch, and maximum volume per-voice, and forcing them even if VoiceOver is set to different values.
• Automatic language switching based on Unicode characters for Arabic, Latin, Hebrew, Russian, and Greek even if VoiceOver does not support it in your language or region, configured on a per-voice profile level.
• iCloud sync between devices to make sure all voice profiles and voice settings stay up to date between devices.
• In a future update, Siri shortcuts will be introduced for switching voice profiles on the fly.

Once you download and install the application, focus will land on the “manage voices” tab, allowing you to download voices and filter them by language, quality, etc. 2 qualities are available for each voice: standard and enhanced. We strongly recommend using the enhanced quality.
Every voice will be a switch button, when checked, it will be added to the queue, and a button to install all selected voices will appear at the bottom of the screen, before the tab bar. Activating this button will install all selected voices. If voices are installed, checking them will cause a button to remove all selected voices to appear instead.
Once installed, you can add the voices to Voiceover using the VoiceOver speech settings, including configuring them as primary, and adding them to the rotor.
The settings tab, contains all the advanced features, such as Voice profiles, and iCloud syncing. Both are disabled by default, to avoid confusion.

Important notes
• Due to bugs with iOS 27, language switching by Unicode characters will not work properly if configured through our engine, it will only work through VoiceOver with the way Apple has chosen to implement it. We will communicate with Apple to hopefully get this fixed.
• There are no bundled voices with the app. You have to download the voices you wish to use from the manage voices tab.

Feedback during the public beta
Please send all your questions, comments, and queries, to: adi@accessmind.net

Pricing
Pricing for the final product, including subscription or perpetual licensing models, has not been decided yet. The public beta will be available to try for free at least until September.

Installing the public beta
Please use the following TestFlight link to install the public beta of Runa TTS on your devices:
https://testflight.apple.com/join/bJQ5UpWQ

We look forward to hearing from you!
Adi Kushnir
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