coldRead vs blablabla: two iOS rehearsal apps compared

coldRead has been on the App Store since 2017. Built by Miljan Milosevic, it was one of the first apps to put speech recognition inside a solo rehearsal tool. If you shopped around in the acting-app corner of the App Store before 2024, you probably opened it.

If you are picking between coldRead and blablabla, both apps solve the same core problem. Where they go after that is where it gets interesting.

What coldRead does

You record the other characters' lines yourself, or let the app read them with the iPhone's built-in speech synthesizer. During rehearsal, speech recognition listens for when you finish your line and advances the scene. It also has a teleprompter mode and a self-tape video recorder built in, so you can read, rehearse, and tape inside one app.

The self-tape recording is a real feature worth naming. If you want one app that handles both practice and the final tape, coldRead can do that.

What blablabla does

blablabla drops the self-tape recording and spends the same space on the rehearsal itself. You import a scene, pick your character, and the app casts each other role with a different premium voice. Four modes take you from cold read to off-book: Listen, Read, Practice, Perform. The last two use on-device speech endpoint detection to advance when you finish your line.

The voices are not the iOS system voices. They are the kind of voices that make a short scene sound like three different people in the room.

Pick coldRead if

• You want one app for rehearsal and self-tape video
• You are fine with the iPhone system voices reading the other parts
• You rehearse mostly in English (coldRead supports more than ten languages but blablabla supports more)
• Apple Watch support matters to you

Pick blablabla if

• You want distinct premium voices per character instead of system TTS
• You want four rehearsal modes rather than one flow
• You rehearse in multiple languages (blablabla supports 74, including Nordic classical diction)
• You want the rehearsal to work fully offline once cached

The practical test

Open a scene you know well. Close your eyes. Play it through. If the voices sound like a reading instead of a scene, that is the gap blablabla was built to fill. If they sound fine for your workflow, coldRead is a perfectly good tool and you do not need to switch.

The free tier on blablabla gives you two voiced scenes with no subscription. Run the same page through both apps. The difference shows up fast.