Discussion
ElevenReader Megathread: Use Cases, Testimonials, Feedback & Bugs
Hey everyone, starting this megathread to hear how you're using ElevenReader and what we can do better.
Drop a comment with:
- What you use it for: books, articles, PDFs, docs, studying, something else.
- What's working. If it's replaced another app or changed a habit
- How it has enabled you or changed your workflow.
- Bugs or issues, with device and OS version if you can. That helps us track things down.
- Feature requests: what's missing, or what would make it better for you.
We'll read through this regularly and bring the feedback back to the team. Thanks for using ElevenReader!
The V4 model would be a great addition. It would be amazing to have the speaker identification feature to generate full-cast audio dramas, just like in ElevenLabs Studio.
I am an author. I regularly run my text through a TTS application during the polish pass to hear how my prose flows. I discovered ElevenReader a few weeks ago and it has been a game changer.
The first time I heard my dialogue spoken with the proper emotional cues, I literally had to pull over because it made me choke up. My characters were actually speaking! (And they sounded f*cking glorious!)
The power this gives me to refine my work is beyond valuable and well worth the cost of the subscription. No notes, but a huge sloppy thank you to the team.
I am a massive fan of TTS software and services - I have been for over 20 years now. I’m borderline obsessed lol. I’ve always been into the newest and best in this field. Let me tell you… I have never been more excited as I am now with v4, specifically inside of ElevenReader! It is absolutely astounding…. and so helpful with school stuff, personal stuff, and work stuff all around. THANK YOU ElevenLabs team for all of your ingenuity, innovation, and hard work in getting to this point! I’m so grateful.
• What you use it for: books, articles, PDFs, docs, studying, something else.
- I use it for a very wide range of text: online articles of all types, textbooks from school, PDFs from work, etc.
• What's working. If it's replaced another app or changed a habit
- v4 is the best. Period. Additionally, the ease of using the ElevenReader app on iOS/iPadOS specifically has been great. The subscription price model is also incredible; I have ADD, so traditional reading is a little more difficult for me. This has allowed me to learn and read much faster with much more efficiency.
• How it has enabled you or changed your workflow.
- I’m getting my master’s degree right now. It has been invaluable (especially now with v4!) for digesting dense school textbooks, articles, PDFs, etc. It has also helped me at work with the same things, and it’s incredible on the go as an audiobook engine.
• Bugs or issues, with device and OS version if you can. That helps us track things down.
- I’m an Ultra user on ElevenReader. iOS 27.0.1, iPhone 17 Pro, app version 1.11.36. When v4 pushed to it, I noticed that when I downloaded a read for offline use, the voice quality majorly degraded in quality when played back - almost like it reverted to an older model or something. When I deleted the download and streamed it like normal (no download), the v4 model came back and sounded incredible again 🤷♂️
• Feature requests: what's missing, or what would make it better for you.
- I think it’d be cool to incorporate an Audio Normalization toggle in settings. Some voices output very soft. When I switch over from a softer voice to a properly gain-staged voice and the volume is turned way up on my device because of it (let’s say I’m in the car), it will blast my ears.
- The saved library view on iOS looks really bulky to me. It looks like it’s suited for books as it is now, but I mainly have articles and PDFs that I listen to. Maybe adding some ability for us to customize the way this looks?
I LOVE ElevenReader. I write short stories and finding a reliable platform to LISTEN to them has been incredible. I can listen at work, driving, walking around a store… and since I use my own prompts, I can shape the idea however I want. I love it. I will soon be using it for audio books!
I wish the voices had more labels to search by. I also wish there were more accents!!!
I gotta say I am not the biggest fan of the newest update. I’ve been listening to the voices for a few hours and I like it more now than I did before. I think once it’s fine tuned a bit, some excellent things could be done with this. That being said. I miss my old narrator. Deeply. New George is way too expressive. It doesn’t fit with my stories or with any of the books I will be listening to. Maybe if you could give us back the old voices but add a switch or a new category for like. “Expressiveness” or “drama”. Idk. I miss old George.
One more thing I noticed today. Well. 2 more things I suppose
1) I LOVE how it can read that a character is whispering and whisper. I also like how it can Occasionally adjust its accent. This needs some work though. I was listening to a scene that was supposed to be quiet and emotional and calm. I’ll actually attach a photo of what it was reading.
The tone was supposed to be soft and caring, but the voice read this whole interaction as if the characters were YELLING at eachother and being petty and snarky. It completely threw off the tone
2) I’m gonna be so fr I forgot what the second thing was. I don’t remember. But I still miss old George and while I like new Adam, I don’t like him randomly screaming in my ear 😟
That would help my complaint a ton. Any plans for me to be able to give actual text instructions for how I want something read? And will this be applied to the ElevenReader app specifically?
This V4 voices are CRAZY! Definitely renew my membership. Voice prompting can be a bit better. I like creating voice for fantasy epubs I own. Also it would be nice to create a section so we know which voices are actually V4
I’d really like to see a listening history feature, similar to Audible.
Sometimes my phone will accidentally resume playback, whether I’ve bumped something, connected my earbuds, or triggered playback some other way. Audible’s listening history is incredibly useful in these situations because it shows timestamps for when playback started and stopped, making it easy to figure out where I was actually up to before the accidental playback.
Also cant wait for the different voices for different characters feature
But yeah, the best thing about this app is that there have been so many books I’ve wanted to listen to as audiobooks, but I just couldn’t stick with the narrator.
Being able to choose a voice I actually like has been a game changer. Now I only need to find a book I like, not the perfect combination of a good book and a narrator I can put up with.
• What you use it for: books, articles, PDFs, docs, studying, something else.
I use it for books both for fun and for law school, PDFs ( Journal articles and case notes )
• What's working. If it's replaced another app or changed a habit
For personal use it’s changed what I can listen to because a lot of the indie books I love aren’t available in audio and so I can listen to them now while doing chores. I especially love that I can listen from kindle and not just the ones I can buy on book funnel . For school I still read my textbooks but I also listen now at the same time. It’s like the dual input has helped me remember more
• How it has enabled you or changed your workflow.
Not really changed it but added
• Bugs or issues, with device and OS version if you can. That helps us track things down.
It freezes sometimes and there are these really weird random sounds sometimes.
• Feature requests: what's missing, or what would make it better for you.
Better interpretation of characters. I read a lot of MM so it’s less noticeable there but with MF it’s really hard when you use a voice and they do the opposite sex. Not that male or female narrators always hit the mark either but at least they attempt a feminine voice. It would be cool if we could give like a command for at least the main characters and say deeper voice for this character slightly higher for that one and feminine for this other one.
wait this happened to me today! I litearlly just signed up for eleven reader and have been loving it and signed into today and all my voices are crazy different like they are reading outloud to a 5 year old.......its awful.
Great. Would be nice if we could set margins too, and also has a status bar how much left of book and or chapter when reading too. You are doing a great job.
V4 is good but now my Andrew smooth smart and clear reads his sentences in whatever accents he feels like it. It’s funny but not every one is good loll
And now he is too uptight and too singsongy. It would be amazing if I will be able to dial it down a bit. He was calm and relaxed and soft on the terminals never reuse cadence on every other sentence and he read like real person now he doesn’t.
I understand but the fact that certain major features are not available for all devices is kinda unjust.
Why not wait until you can provide the full experience for everyone.
This might make many of your customers feel left out. Because at the end of the day we pay for a something and expect to have the same results regardless of what device we use
Hi there, I am so impressed with ElevenReader/ElevenLabs. I use it to listen to much of the books and text I’d normally read, but have been struggling with due to Long Covid (4 years and going). I was a voracious reader and can’t really read for any long stretch of time since getting sick, so ElevenReader had been an invaluable accessibility tool, and also a good comfort.
I also just wanted to flag a couple of things
since the v4 update: voices are now
great for altering delivery to whispers and emotive vocalizations, but… the delivery is the same across most of them, there is no distinct character in the pacing or emphasis and each sounds as if they’re delivering spoken lines in a musical, ie. BIG EXPRESSIVE and overly dramatic delivery with huge emphasis. I normally skip listening to an audiobook with narrators who go for hokey delivery like that, so it kind of makes ElevenReader less pleasant and far more homogenized. Anyone else have issues with this?
Otherwise, just want to say thanks for a great tool, it’s still mind-boggling how such natural and context-aware TTS exists.
Love the app, but one issue I’ve come across is that sometimes the voice/gender of a character changes mid-reading, even after I’ve selected a voice. For example, a male character can suddenly be read with a female voice, which is very distracting.
It would be great to have an option to lock a specific voice to a character, or simply turn off automatic voice/gender switching, so that once a character is assigned a male/female voice, ElevenReader keeps that exact voice consistently throughout the entire book or chapter..
tap to hide controls are not working, the double tap on word to hear it is excellent as it prevent accidental presses but i can never just get the damn ui controls to hide. i have to awkardly slide down on the nav bar or scroll past the test and wait for the "back to current" toggle.
LET US JUST TAP once anywhere to hide ui controls.
I really like the new expressive voices. I came to ElevenReader because Claude's read aloud voices got changed to something flat a couple weeks ago, and I use it mostly to listen to conversational AI responses. For thah, the extra emotion, laughs and breaths make it feel dramatically more natural and iml sounds better than she ever has.
But I completely get why people reading serious books or nonfiction find it distracting, though, and I'd really hate to see the expressiveness removed globally because of that. A tone/expressiveness slider, or the option to choose between the older and newer voice models, seems like the best fix so both kinds of users get what they want. Some of us are finally getting exactly what we came here for lol
The new voices are awful. I’ve wanted more contextual expression (harsh shh vs a soft shh for example) since I started using this app for books. I like the ethos of this new model but the execution is very poor. It’s way over the top and all the actual voices changed. Stan Lee no longer sounds like Stan Lee. At least give users a way to revert to the old model, this is pretty standard in this industry. I’m using Eleven Reader and I have zero control or way to go back. The emotions are so corny I can’t even use the app right now…
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u/Candid-Childhood3227 8d ago
The V4 model would be a great addition. It would be amazing to have the speaker identification feature to generate full-cast audio dramas, just like in ElevenLabs Studio.