Saturday 31 July 2010

Readplease

This may be seven years old, and it may be cut and paste, but I think that this is still one friendliest pieces of text-to-speech other there. Its beauty is a simple download, easy to access interface, large symbols, and control of the key elements, namely speech, font size, it has several voices, and word highlighting. You can adjust the pause between paragraphs (to consolidate your thoughts) and adjust colours (e.g. for highlighting). You could even have it start on startup, and read your own text. How about "I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you." In case you do not recognise it, it was spoken by the computer Hal in Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey.

ReadPlease 2003

Thursday 29 July 2010

Ivona Mini Reader


I rather liked this little reader. It is free, and has a good voice.

Ivona MiniReader

Wednesday 28 July 2010

Natural Reader Text-to-speech

Inspired by the comment left by Lis yesterday, the next TTS to consider at is NaturalReader. This is free software which comes in two versions: cut and paste or a Floating Bar (see bottom left of the image above).

It is downloadable free, and uses free microsoft voice. If you want higher functionality, such as saving files as audio, you need to pay for it.

Natural Reader

Tuesday 27 July 2010

Text to speech voice

I am currently writing an article about text-to-speech, and therefore a number of the entries will be about that work. Today, I give you the list of all the voices I know of that can be used for text-to-speech. If you know of others, please let me know. As far as I know, these can all be used with other software such as Balabolka.

List of Voices

Monday 26 July 2010

Balabolka text-to-speech software


When it comes to Text-to-Speech software, there is so much out there that it is hard to find a recommendation. But today I have one. And what is more, it has everything I could ever imagine needing, which is a far cry from much of the others which appear to have been not full through through. It is also multilingual, so you can line it up with any voice you wish and have the menus in the right language.

Balabolka

Friday 9 July 2010

Online text to speech

Here is a review of the current top ten online text to speech systems.

Top 10 Text to speech