E-Book Reader Is Available on iPad from Acapela Voices

Whether you like or need to be read to, there's now a new application for iPad that does just that. Acapela Group, a European voice tech company, created vBookZ, an iPad application that uses Acapela speech synthesis to change written text into speech.

Unlike books on tape, VBookz is live text-to-speech (TTS) that doesn't require file conversion or stored book files. The app also uses speech capability and navigation tools with which a user can interact and a cursor that allows users to follow along, pause, or repeat.

"Our goal is to convert reading into a rich user experience where text-to-speech quality and acceptance is obviously a key ingredient," said Dror Kalisky, co-founder and CEO of vBookZ, in a statement. "We rely on Acapela's wide portfolio of languages and voices to deliver the right result."

"Acapela voices have already been deployed in many iPhone apps and are now entering the iPad environment to add value and inspire new ways to transform and tell stories," said Lars-Erik Larsson, CEO of Acapela Group, in a statement, "We are very pleased to give the say to this powerful ebook reader and work with an innovative player such as vBookz to contribute to the creation of new ways to access and read books."

While vBookz comes with English built-in, other languages can be purchased and include: Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, Greek, German, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish. It costs $4.99 for the application, and another $4.99 per language. Currently, it reads 30,000 titles, which are available for free with the app.