Review Insights · App Store
NaturalReader - Text To Speech
NaturalSoft Limited · 8,596 ratings · ★ 4.6
4.6
★★★★★
8,596 ratings
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Top complaints - extracted from 28 negative reviews
Recurring phrases mined from 1-2★ reviews. The bigger the percentage, the more users have the same problem. Fix the top 2-3 in your version and you have product-market fit on day one.
1
"voices"
11 negative reviews mention this · 39% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Pro is a joke. I bought an annual pro and I already regret it. The models I paid extra for are chatgpt and Gemini and not only are they less stable than the plus voices, literally changing on each stop and go, the audio quality is so bad that it gives me …" - 3D Bot
2
"voice"
9 negative reviews mention this · 32% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Pro is a joke. I bought an annual pro and I already regret it. The models I paid extra for are chatgpt and Gemini and not only are they less stable than the plus voices, literally changing on each stop and go, the audio quality is so bad that it gives me …" - 3D Bot
3
"free"
9 negative reviews mention this · 32% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Not free anymore. Not only had they they infested it with ai bull (it was fine i could avoid it), now it’s not practically free anymore!!! I can’t listed to anything for more than 10 minutes!!! This update came out of NOWHERE WTF. Screw this app and screw th…" - Pinkie The Gypsy
4
"reading"
6 negative reviews mention this · 21% of all complaints
★★★★★ "I’m looking for an alternative. I’ve used this app for years even though it didn’t always get the pronunciation right and skip sentences in parentheses because it doesn’t limit how much I can speed up, not how many files I upload. But today, it would only give me about 10…" - e__has__issues
5
"sound"
5 negative reviews mention this · 18% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Doesn't sound natural. It sounds very robotic. There's nothing natural about it. It doesn't have any impressive features that I saw. I uninstalled it about an hour after installing it." - W1ck3dWitch
6
"minutes"
5 negative reviews mention this · 18% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Pro is a joke. I bought an annual pro and I already regret it. The models I paid extra for are chatgpt and Gemini and not only are they less stable than the plus voices, literally changing on each stop and go, the audio quality is so bad that it gives me …" - 3D Bot
7
"version"
5 negative reviews mention this · 18% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Forced prompts to upgrade. Why the hell I getting this? I want the free version and want to listen to my books WITHOUT having to touch my phone at work. What the hell are you guys doing trying to get me fired?! Print when I open the app now when I’m already using th…" - allopshf
8
"free voices"
5 negative reviews mention this · 18% of all complaints
★★★★★ "I’m looking for an alternative. I’ve used this app for years even though it didn’t always get the pronunciation right and skip sentences in parentheses because it doesn’t limit how much I can speed up, not how many files I upload. But today, it would only give me about 10…" - e__has__issues
9
"until"
5 negative reviews mention this · 18% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Pay 20 dollars monthly for them to cap your reading.. I hit their daily cap not even halfway through the day is over. the free/“premium” voices sound like nails on a chalkboard and are completely useless. This app is useless until they remove the cap for PAYING CUSTOMERS. I mean come on. How a…" - Hi1592&(;82;$48@(149)49
10
"subscription"
5 negative reviews mention this · 18% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Everything is subscription now. The app is now completely behind a paywall now. It use to have a few good voices for free. It even let you use the voices built into the phone. No more. Now it gives you the most horrible voice for free just to say they have a free option. …" - BekleyTea
11
"doesn"
4 negative reviews mention this · 14% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Doesn't sound natural. It sounds very robotic. There's nothing natural about it. It doesn't have any impressive features that I saw. I uninstalled it about an hour after installing it." - W1ck3dWitch
12
"read"
4 negative reviews mention this · 14% of all complaints
★★★★★ "Unable to read my Theology textbooks. See title" - PreacherPastorman
📋 All 28 negative reviews
Every 1-2★ review we fetched. Use the copy button to grab them all for your own analysis (paste into ChatGPT/Claude with a prompt like "summarize core user problems, group by theme, ignore bugs, focus on missing features").
Pro is a joke
I bought an annual pro and I already regret it. The models I paid extra for are chatgpt and Gemini and not only are they less stable than the plus voices, literally changing on each stop and go, the audio quality is so bad that it gives me a headache after three minutes. Tin-hisses on the s and f sounds. Actual crackles I’d expect on grangran’s 1940 record player. I got my money back. And yes the high speed network connection was completely stable across devices I tested 🙄, including wired and wireless , whose only active load was this app. In fact I even tried downloading the sound file, which failed to process once, took forever after I restarted it, and that audio was just as bad.
I switched to Siri, voice 1 & 2 of UK English and got as good diction as Natural Reader voices I used with slightly more mistakes in interpreting punctuation in prose using OSX devices. But it’s totally workable now. iOS readouts aren’t quite as beefy for prose but good enough for news and academic. Since Nat Reader is now going towards slop I might as well wait another year for apple to keep up, at least it only charges me once up front and the purchase comes with useful hardware.
I switched to Siri, voice 1 & 2 of UK English and got as good diction as Natural Reader voices I used with slightly more mistakes in interpreting punctuation in prose using OSX devices. But it’s totally workable now. iOS readouts aren’t quite as beefy for prose but good enough for news and academic. Since Nat Reader is now going towards slop I might as well wait another year for apple to keep up, at least it only charges me once up front and the purchase comes with useful hardware.
Not free anymore
Not only had they they infested it with ai bull (it was fine i could avoid it), now it’s not practically free anymore!!! I can’t listed to anything for more than 10 minutes!!! This update came out of NOWHERE WTF. Screw this app and screw this company.
For those of you looking for a better app try Narrly. It’s literally this app before the slop took over 😊
For those of you looking for a better app try Narrly. It’s literally this app before the slop took over 😊
No longer really free
They have made it where you can listen for free for 5-10minutes then it skips forward and pauses to advertise paying. It is no longer in a usable state for free.
Forced prompts to upgrade
Why the hell I getting this? I want the free version and want to listen to my books WITHOUT having to touch my phone at work. What the hell are you guys doing trying to get me fired?! Print when I open the app now when I’m already using the free version. Pissing me off omg.
Ads
New update made ads that pause your listening every 5-10 minutes. Not an exaggeration. Before it was a 5/5 now it’s a 1/5
idk...
idk what you fixed by jun 7th 2026, but the free usa voices are reading horribly: spelling a lots of words or the beginning of longer words. whats the point of fixing if you mess up a lot in the meantime? if you dont want to give free voice, just make the app only payable. dont pull the honeystring!
Pay 20 dollars monthly for them to cap your reading.
I hit their daily cap not even halfway through the day is over. the free/“premium” voices sound like nails on a chalkboard and are completely useless. This app is useless until they remove the cap for PAYING CUSTOMERS. I mean come on. How are you going to offer a service and cap it for the people who pay for it. Completely asinine.
Poorly ran app
This app runs like the internet did in the early 2000. It is a shame you even put this garbage out. The interface is glitchy and very unresponsive. Selecting a voice and then trying to upload anything is a straight chore. DO BETTER!
Massive audio problems
App will constantly restart or fail. Audio will simply not play even though timer is moving. App needs to be reset multiple times in order to play sound again but will malfunction again shortly after.
Disappointing
After you upgrade to the most expensive version you find out that you can only import around 20 pages per conversation
except a scanned doc or ocr can be around 50 pages
so if you have a pdf that is over 20 pages you have to import the file in batches of 20 pages from dropbox
they should post that problem so you don’t spend 150 dollars like i did and find out only 20 pages per conversation can be imputed Shop around before you buy this service
except a scanned doc or ocr can be around 50 pages
so if you have a pdf that is over 20 pages you have to import the file in batches of 20 pages from dropbox
they should post that problem so you don’t spend 150 dollars like i did and find out only 20 pages per conversation can be imputed Shop around before you buy this service
Took away all good free voices
I used to love this app. They had several free voices you could choose from. Now everything is behind a paywall and the 2 free options are horrible.
Everything is subscription now
The app is now completely behind a paywall now. It use to have a few good voices for free. It even let you use the voices built into the phone. No more. Now it gives you the most horrible voice for free just to say they have a free option. And then for anything else, you have to fork over more than a hundred dollars.
A buggy mess
This app crashes constantly
Limited on words
This was a good app, but you are limited on how many minutes you can listen per day, which is ridiculous when you pay for a subscription! After I bought it, I realized it was limited, so I deleted it.
Unnecessary Accents
I paid for the Pro version in order to complete readings for school as it is easier for me to comprehend spoken information. When I do any readings about Africa or regions it will switch in and out of a Jamaican or Caribbean accent. There is no way to fix this as all the US voices are also listed as “multi-lingual”. When trying to resolve this issue I had to speak with an AI agent who said there was no way to resolve this using any of the Pro voices I paid for ($160 per year). When I asked to speak with a live agent it stated that the wait would be several hours.
Annoying pro version
“clone your own voice” but you can’t use it unless you pay… and it’s more than a hundred dollars for a SUBSCRIPTION! You’re asking a lot, and subscriptions are stupid. Most apps are stupid nowadays. This is not breaking the glass ceiling.
Do NOT Subscribe.
Scummy company. Subscribed for a year on icloud. Wanted to use pro features mainly in the web app but wanted the safety of an icloud subscription to prevent auto renew nonsense. Things went great for a couple days until they updated their policy so that the app store subscription I paid for only applies to the app. Can no longer use pro features online. Now they want me to pay more bc they changed their policy after I paid. Definition of a scummy company.
Thieving Change
They suck - I bought, was happy, retuned and I can’t get what I bought making the company both thieves snd grifters - they suck as does their current useless un agreed upon version of the newly useless product - and no help to fix it either makes them POS.
Ridiculous pricing!
It works great for producing text to speech content. The pricing is outrageous though.
Doesn't sound natural
It sounds very robotic. There's nothing natural about it. It doesn't have any impressive features that I saw. I uninstalled it about an hour after installing it.
Unable to read my Theology textbooks
See title
I’m looking for an alternative
I’ve used this app for years even though it didn’t always get the pronunciation right and skip sentences in parentheses because it doesn’t limit how much I can speed up, not how many files I upload. But today, it would only give me about 10 minutes of reading time before skipping several pages and an upgrade to window pops up even though I was using Nicky, a free voice under USA English. The faq even says the free voices are unlimited in use. I even took a screenshot. But now this app seems determined to force a paid upgrade. Looks like it’s time to find an alternative or to just use Siri.
Not for Kindle books
I wanted to purchase but not for kindle books
Free voices changed out of nowhere!
I used this app practically every day to read my books, but the voices changed and now I can't stand the free voices!! Bring back the old free voices!!!!
It is ok, not very smart
This is an ok app, the voices are a little robotic but ok. It doesn’t know how to pronounce some medical terms which ChatGPT absolutely nails. But the worse part is when there are tables on a pdf, because it jumps from text to the tables back and forth. It is not as smart as other AI apps for pdfs.
Things that could be improved if the developers take suggestions:
- zooming on a off should be by pinching like anything else on an iPhone. Pressing the + or - buttons is hard as they are tiny.
- when zooming in on the pdf while it is being read, the highlighted area is lost so it’s difficult to know where on the pdf the AI voice is currently reading from
- many times while the AI voice is reading a pdf, the cursor is on the right spot but there’s a second highlighted paragraph not being read that makes things confusing.
Things that could be improved if the developers take suggestions:
- zooming on a off should be by pinching like anything else on an iPhone. Pressing the + or - buttons is hard as they are tiny.
- when zooming in on the pdf while it is being read, the highlighted area is lost so it’s difficult to know where on the pdf the AI voice is currently reading from
- many times while the AI voice is reading a pdf, the cursor is on the right spot but there’s a second highlighted paragraph not being read that makes things confusing.
Initially great... until you hit the one year mark
A couple months ago I would have given this 5 stars. I loved being able to make my own little "podfics" out of stories and fics I read online and the AI voices that this app offers are very realistic! Then my subscription (which I pay $21 a month for, btw) hit the one year mark and all hell broke loose. All of the sudden my files started to vanish. Come to find out, they delete them automatically after one year... I'm sure it was in the fine print somewhere but it still sucks. For $252 a year, it's unfathomable that there isn't an easy way save your files. I'm now in the market for another text to speech reader.
An OK app but many features are broken
This app works OK until it doesn’t. And it often doesn’t. The voice cloning does not work at all. It gives constant errors with no support from the AI agent. Reading text is OK, and it has better voices than some of the competitors. But it is glitchy as heck and breaks often.
App glitches, no clear tech support
The app worked ok (except poor pronunciation and sound glitches) for a couple days until it randomly started skipping all the words in the document and reading only the punctuation marks in it - in a different language and voice than I had set, mind you. When I requested tech support, the robot didn’t provide any useful assistance, and when I requested a human agent, it started spamming me with messages containing only my email address.
Sentiment summary
90%
Positive (4-5★)
3%
Neutral (3★)
7%
Negative (1-2★)