Speakhby

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Inspiration

My former college classmate published an iOS app named "Voice" which is a voice to text speech, and he made a profit from it. That is a very simple app utilized Apple's Speech framework. Thus, the idea came to me to create an TTS app allow people listening the story or novel without looking at the screen.

What it does

Speakhby is an intuitive and user-friendly iOS app that transforms any text into clear, natural-sounding speech. It supports a variety of languages and voices, giving you the flexibility to customize your listening experience.

How we built it

Planning and project management with Trello. It is built with SwiftUI and Apple's Speech Synthesis framework and MVVM. Use CoreData for data persistency, and created subscriptions as purchase mode. Also use RevenueCat SDK to create the payment part and used its Paywall too.

Challenges we ran into

SwiftUI's TextEditor cannot fill all my requirement, so I roll back to UIKit's TextView
Had a re-catch about how to use CoreData, I found that I forget it every time :)
Export TTS to audio file, solved by SO and ChatGPT
Hardest one, created subscriptions on Apple Connect, but unable to find it on version page. The answer is I must add screenshot for each subscription then it will appear on version page. I cannot believe it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As an indie app developer, I spend 5 months time outside my work to create Speakhby.

What we learned

Get used to SwiftUI develop flow. Planning is important before you start to code, begin with small, don't think too much features or functions, you are unable to accomplish that as an indie dev. Publish it first, then we still can add more features after it.