Wednesday, March 23, 2016

What's going on with ibreviary?

If you normally rely on the ibreviary app for Android, prepare for a wild ride.

If you have to manually confirm whether to do updates on your apps, do not update ibreviary! Keep your current version a while longer, because the new version has some bugs to work out.

Apparently they have added an audio option. But this ain't no DivineOffice.org when it comes to audio. This audio is composed of (I'm making up this term) robo-words. And, in their English audio, it's English robo-words done by a native speaker of Italian. Many mispronunciations. Difficult to understand.

To put it another way: this English is like the text-to-speech feature on your e-reader, but in an Italian accent by someone who hasn't quite mastered English pronunciation. While the English of DivineOffice.org is like an professional audiobook.   Of course, ibreviary is free and Divineoffice.org is pretty pricey.  

I appreciate that ibreviary's good intentions, but I don't think many of us will find this a useful addition.  

In addition, the update of the app gave me lots of trouble just opening the app and being able to select English for the texts.  I had to uninstall and reinstall it in order to make it work at all.  After that, it began to work better, especiallly once I shut off the audio option.

Tell me about your experience with the new ibreviary app.