SpeakText for Me FREE - Speak & Translate Web pages and Documents for iOS

The SpeakText line of apps is designed to provide a more robust suite of tools for text-to-speech integration on your iOS devices, including translation into over 30 languages. SpeakText for Me FREE combines the abilities of several SpeakText apps, but has quite a few shortcomings, not the least of which is a pretty hefty price tag if you opt to upgrade from the limited free version.

The interface for SpeakText for Me FREE is the most immediate issue. Messy, ad-supported, and sprawling, it lacks the clear direction and sharp design needed to recommend a paid upgrade. It actually proved fairly effective once you got past the interface, but the free version has limits on the number of sentences it will read or translate, and the paid version is $20, which makes the upgrade a tough sell. SpeakText for Me combines all of the features of the SpeakText suite of apps, so you do get the Office, Web, and Composition tools (there are individual apps with only one of those features each). The translation efforts were as accurate as most online language translators, but for plain text to speech it didn't perform any better than the free tools included in iOS 6.

SpeakText is impressive in some ways, but its design, interface, and distribution model are all issues. The cost is high, the interface is frustrating, and the translation tool is not quite accurate enough to warrant the rest.