We analyzed 96 negative reviews from the top 5 Speed Reading Assistant apps on the App Store. Here's what users hate most.
Ranked by frequency — how often each complaint appears in negative reviews.
42% of negative reviews mention this issue.
"App always freezes up during speaking. Play button and pause always freezes up have to continually re boot I pad with only offers a temporary fix."
"Once I load the text file and choose it in the side bar to be read out loud, the app hangs. It freezes and I can't do anything but force-quit the app"
28% of negative reviews mention this issue.
"Better text extraction from PDFs. It is very distracting when the app doesn't know to delete the hyphenation and ends up saying 'lit-LTE' for exa"
"I purchased this app specifically to read PDF files, and I've come to find out it's in capable of doing that... I receive error messages about them not being simple enough."
25% of negative reviews mention this issue.
"I would much rather read than listen to a 'voice' worse than that of Siri."
"the voice is just too mechanical/robotic. It's sort of disturbing to listen to the app for an extended period of time."
22% of negative reviews mention this issue.
"It doesn't bookmark where you left off and it won't allow a specific start page so I have to start from the v"
"You get one option: Start at the beginning of the page. Get interrupted for some reason? You start all the way back at the beginning again."
31% of negative reviews mention this issue.
"It says that the app can detect what's part of an article and what's not, but it read the reporter's name about 10 times and frequently included phrases like 'enlarge picture.'"
"I've not managed to get this app to read any articles. It failed to extract text from webpage; it failed to extract text from pocket articles."
15% of negative reviews mention this issue.
"First article I try and read off of a Seeking Alpha investment page is only available on German language. That doesn't help when you speak English."
"The first article I imported to Speaky only offers German as the language spoken."
Design and usability issues driving negative reviews.
The visual highlighting that shows which word is being read gets out of sync with the actual audio, making it impossible to follow along visually
"the spoken word and highlighted words do not match. In fact, Speaky freezes up on the highlighting about a sentence into my articles."
UI elements are difficult to see and read, particularly with certain color schemes that make text illegible
"light gray text on a bright lime green header background is almost impossible to see. (The App Store screenshots show the text as being wh"
Users cannot fine-tune reading speed to their preferred pace, with jumps between speed settings being too large
"The speed adjustment is quite coarse; OTOH, it does adjust fast enough for"
Users cannot get help when problems occur, with feedback systems crashing or being non-existent
"I went to app feedback within app and it crashes every time i try. I went to website and there is no place to get support there."
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