What’s new.

The player now shows where you are instead of a stuck “Preparing audio…” message while paused.

• Skipping to the next or previous sentence while paused now shows that sentence right away, with its first word highlighted.
• Moving between Playlist items while paused, or clicking a word to jump there, now shows the page you landed on.
• After you finish your Playlist and reopen the app, the player shows the last page instead of “Preparing audio…”.

Reading starts more smoothly, and the opening words no longer go missing on long sentences.

• Fixed some voices sometimes skipping the first word of a passage with a long sentence. To keep it reliable, these voices now top out at 1.00x speed. If you had a faster speed saved, it loads at 1.00x.
• The first few seconds of a read now break at natural pauses, so you hear fewer odd hitches as the reading gets going.
• Switching to another voice in the same language now keeps what your Mac has learned about its speed, so playback starts smoothly.
• New setting under Text Processing: Highlight Overridden Words in Player. Turn it off if you’d rather not see your pronunciation overrides picked out in red.

Book and document reading gets smarter, and jumping around while you listen lands where you expect.

• Book / Document Reading now has a setup guide. Open it from the setup screen with Read the Setup Guide First.
• Column Aware reading order is now the default, so pages with columns read in the right order.
• A few blank pages in a row no longer pause your book. Reading pauses only after five, and pressing Play skips the next few blank pages.
• Going back to replay an earlier part of a book now plays forward and picks the book back up where it left off.
• Dragging the progress bar ahead to a part that isn’t ready yet now starts at the sentence you picked, not up to half a minute earlier.

Reading articles from Safari is now easier to set up.

• Read Browser Article in the menu bar shows whether the Safari extension is on, and Open Safari Settings takes you straight to the switch.
• A picture of the Safari toolbar button shows what to look for and when to click it.

The first release. Read text aloud from websites, files, the clipboard, and other apps with high-quality voices that run entirely on your Mac.