Speechify Books: Read & Listen

If you’re going to sell it as an audiobook replacement, you shouldn’t need to reopen the app each time you pause it to restart it.

I participated in the three day free trial (starting 03/27/2024) to see if this app was able to fit my needs but within 30 minutes of using the app I realized that this app was not what I was looking for so I cancelled my free subscription right away (same day- 03/27/2024). I received notice from the App Store that my free trail subscription had been successfully cancelled moments after. Today (03/29/2024) I received a message from the app confirming the cancellation of my subscription from Natalie with a discount if I was to decide to ever subscribe to the app in the future. 45 mins later I received notice from my bank that $139.00 subscription charged from speechify was successful. Not only did I receive two confirmations that my subscription was cancelled (one even from the app-that I have a screenshot of) but they charged my card anyway. Completely unacceptable!!

Coming from daily use of Audible, I’ve been using Speechify Books for over a year now. It’s fine. Every day I think about going back to Audible, and unless the app improves, I probably will. I have faith in the organization as a whole though and hope for improvements (at least compared to predatory Audible). I want it to succeed, I am just… a little disgruntled maybe lol. Here are my notes: - States. State is sometimes not well indicated in the app. Example: I don’t know what books are downloaded and which aren’t. This is a IA and visual noise issue. Also why is the download option hidden? This is a basic need that needs to be presented better. - Bugs. There are high friction bugs frequently. Example: One defining competitive feature is reading while listening; when listening to a book that has reading available however, often the chapters will restart themselves instead of advancing. The highlighted text will get out of sync from the audio and clicking text restarts the chapter. Audio controls will stop working. I can’t tell if it’s ever book or just some books. But when you have to force restart the app every 30 minutes or so…. - Chapters aren’t labeled. Aka, they’re all just “Track #.” This is far beneath a premium audiobook experience. - I want to archive or delete books from my library. I want to favorite or pin others. No such functionality yet. There are many other basic interactions I would expect to have that are not in intuitive places or just do not exist. - There are really cool stats, that you are hiding on the last page in a sheet. Why? Wasted opportunity there. Most users probably never see these states when it could drive loyalty. - Search bar on Library and Discover page are too similar to not be global. Even knowing the app, I often start typing in the wrong search bar, then wonder why I’m not seeing results, then have to change pages and restart. Either make them more distinct, minimize one of them by default, or make them global with sections. - UI of Library is a bit plain and uninspired. I said what I said.

I love the aesthetics of the app and the UI/UX. It has all of the books that I could want. But I feel like it’s a money grab at this point. I’ve been paying for Speechify to read my pdfs and I wish the Speechify Books membership was an added bonus instead of separate entities. Now I’m paying for both and it’s just a lot.

I downloaded speechify and utilized the free trial. I disabled the automatic renewal function. I ultimately decided I didn’t want to continue after the free trial. Speechify took a year premium subscription fee from my account 5 days after the end of my free trial but it wasn’t linked to my app and wouldn’t allow me to use the subscription. It continued to be an inactive subscription on my apple account. I contacted the company 2 times over a 7 day period via email (the ONLY way to contact them) and had no response. Great concept, does need improvement in overall app performance, and DEFINITELY needs better customer service response.

I love the app, especially reading along with the audiobooks when I feel like it. I feel like it would be my go-to audiobook app IF it worked consistently but many times it gets stuck on a chapter, repeating it over and over again, or it won’t let me skip ahead or move back, or it won’t pause with my headphones. I have to close out the app and restart my phone before it will cooperate again.

I am a fan of webnovels and would love to listen and drive. It’s sad no support is offered for uploaded books

Ebooks uploaded to the same account can not share between web account and iOS APP. Make me doubt is the APP a fake APP? Because it can not access speechify’s user account information.

I signed up for a 3-day free trial. When I went to cancel my trial before the end of the trial period I was immediately charged a full monthly subscription fee. I did not have the opportunity to cancel the trial and avoid the fee. I reached out to customer service and they were unwilling to refund my subscription fee. Additionally the app interface is annoying. They advertise as a way to increase one’s reading comprehension by merging the auditory and visual, but the highlighted texted word-by-word is extremely distracting making it difficult to read. And you can’t even turn off the highlighted text function. At least let me turn it off. The audiobook side of the app lacks an easy and intuitive navigation tool. I can’t jump back or forward 15 seconds with the touch of a button. Instead, if I’m just listening I have to scroll the timeline bar manually, or pull up the book text and find the exact paragraph where I want to rewind to. Very clunky and frustrating. It’s neither a good reading platform or a good audiobook platform.

Really love this app. I love that I can follow long with the text while I listen to the narrators. As someone that mostly listens to fantasy and sci-fi, it’s so amazing to be able to see how all the proper nouns are spelt. I like that I can click directly on the text to jump forward and back; it makes finding your place easy if you get distracted or fall asleep.