From the interface, volume and rate of speech can be changed. It can read an entire document or a selected section of text. According to the information on Speak Up, you are able to paste text in the field for speech reading. You may find, as this user did, that this doesn’t work. It may depend on your operating system and settings or it may be a flaw in the version of Speak Up. To have Speak Up read a document, convert it to .txt format first and then click the “Save file” button in the bottom pane. There are three buttons in this pane. The first is an arrow and you use this to start the text reading. The one in the middle is to open documents to enter into the field and the third is for saving files.

After you have converted the document to a text file and clicked the Save file button, a new window will open. Copy and paste the text file into that field then select and open the document. Click the arrow button to start text-to-speech.

It will not allow you to paste a document in the Save file field if you do not have Administrator privileges, which is just silly. When you open Speak Up; always right-click the icon first. Then select “Run as Administrator” to avoid running into this problem.

Click Save and then you can use the Open document button to select the text file. Double-click the desired file and the text will appear in the Speak Up field.

Click the arrow button and the reading will proceed. The rate of speech is set to “Slow” by default. Depending on which voice you use, the speed will vary, but there seems to be no need to ever speed it up or it starts to become incomprehensible. The get more voices, click the “Get” tab at the top of the window and select More voices.

You can explore the other features and functions and determine how useful this application will be for your needs as you learn how to use it. Give it a chance. Once you get the customizations and settings just right, it serves a practical purpose despite some minor drawbacks.

What is meant by “fairly” well? It is the typical text reader voice; monotone and perpetual. As a result, certain segue in the text sound like a run-on sentence or a period that would normally bring appropriate pause is missed. Ultimately, the reading is understandable and you can work with it. For hearing information, it does serve a purpose.

Sometimes spending long hours in front of a computer screen can strain the eyes and you might want to take a break and still get the information from lengthy text. This Google Chrome extension will do the trick. Listen to long articles read aloud while resting your weary eyes. This is also useful for taking notes from lengthy text. While it is read to you, you can take information and jot it down without having to pause. Simply select any text on any webpage and Chrome Speak will read it out. You are able to customize the rate, pitch and volume of the reading voice. There are multiple languages supported and this feature can also be used offline if needed.

To download the extension, use the following link. It takes seconds and the installation is completed. To use Chrome Speak, click on the earphone icon in the upper right portion of the toolbar.

This will open a menu for the extension. This menu is what you will use to set speed, volume and pitch.

There is a field in which you can copy-paste or write text to hear. Click the speak button to hear the entered text. Select the “More options” option to set the voice options.

The Windows 7 default is a single digital voice called Microsoft Anna, a female voice with an American accent (generalized). You can add voices and select any of them from the drop-down menu in speech properties. The text will be read in any language selected, as long as it is supported by the extension.

The basic use involves a simple highlighting of text on a given page. Highlight the text that you want to have read and then right-click the highlighted field and choose “Read the selection text” to initiate the reading. You will start listening immediately at this point. Use the context menu, accessible from another right-click on the highlighted field or from the earphone icon, to select Stop to cease the reading.

The extension will stop on its own once it has reached the end of the highlighted text. Chrome Speak offers support on Windows, Mac OS X, and Chrome OS and uses native test-to-speech capabilities provided by these operating systems.

We have reviewed some text to speech converters in the past, like the Windows program Balabolka or the Linux application Festival.

TTSReader is another program for Windows that can turn plain text and rich text documents into mp3 or wav files. You do not necessarily have to convert the files, as it is possible to listen to them directly on the computer.

You can paste text directly into the application interface, or load supported document formats into the queue. This way it is possible to add multiple text documents to the program to listen to all of them at once.

TTSReader uses the built-in Microsoft Text-To-Speech Voice which ships with the Windows operating system. Users who have installed additional voices can select them in the lower right corner of the program. Here it is furthermore possible to change the reading speed, pitch and volume.

The active document is displayed in the program interface. Playback controls are provided at the top of the interface, including options to pause, stop and skip sentences or paragraphs.

The tools menu lists the available conversion options. You can either select Read to WAV or Read to MP3 there.

The menus look similar. It is possible to select one, multiple or all documents that have been added to the queue for processing. The bitrate, format and output directory can be configured on the configuration screen as well.

The standard quality settings are a bitrate of 48 Kbps and Mono, which ensures that the resulting audio files are small in size. You can increase the audio quality to 160 Kbps and stereo if you want, which may be useful if size does not not matter.

Text to Speech Reader is a nice little application that is offered as a portable version and installer. The ability to convert multiple text documents to mp3 or wav is the program’s greatest strength. The lack of support for common formats such as doc or pdf may be a problem for some users, as they need to convert said document formats before they can play or convert them in the software. Probably the easiest way is to copy and paste the contents of unsupported documents into a supported document format.

TTSReader is available for download at the developer website. Download links to free and commercial voices are offered at the site as well.

Balabolka is a free text-to-speed software for the Windows operating system. The program makes use of all computer voices that are installed on the PC which means that it is possible to install additional free or commercial speech packages to improve performance or add support for different languages.

The interface looks very much like a standard notepad interface with the exception of a “speech” pane near the top. Users can select A Microsoft Speech API (the choice was SAPI 4 or 5 on Windows 7 Pro) and a voice package from a pulldown menu. It is furthermore possible to change various settings that affect the voice and speech, for instance the reading speed, pitch or volume.

Balabolka supports many different file formats from plain txt to HTML, pdf, docx, epub and fb2 to archive formats such as zip and rar.

Options to read aloud, stop and pause are available in the interface and also via keyboard shortcuts. One interesting option is the ability to save audio files which basically means that users can turn supported text documents into audio files such as mp3 or wav. That’s interesting for users who need to read / listen to something but prefer to do so while on the move.

Outputs can get rather big depending on the size of the text file. Balabolka can split audio files into multiple parts.

The developer links to several free and commercial voice files that can be downloaded to add various languages the application. It is recommended to download at least one or two as they tend to make a huge difference to the standard voice included in the operating system.

Balabolka without doubt is one of the top free text to speech programs for the Windows operating system. The application is compatible with all 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system from Windows 2000 to Windows 7.

There are also many sub-systems that can be used for this purpose. But in this article I want to address using the Festival system to enable text to speech recognition. Once this is working you can use it however you need and in as many ways as you need.

Festival

The Festival text to speech system was created by Alan W. Black  at the Center for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh (with contributions from Carnegie Melon University). Festival is a full text to speech system with many APIs and a full environment for research and development in the area of speech synthesis.

Festival has been designed as a multi-lingual system which includes English (British and American pronunciation), Welsh, and Spanish. For other languages (such as Castilian Spanish, Czech, Finnish, Hindi, Italian, Marathi, Polish, Russian and Telugu) add ons must be installed for use.

Installation

Many distributions already include Festival by default. But in case your did not, you can install it with these easy steps:

Open up a terminal window.

1. Su to the root user (or use sudo if needed).
2. Issue the command yum install festival (replace yum with your particular package installer such as apt-get).
3. Accept any dependencies.

That’s it! Festival should now be on your system and ready to go. Let’s test it.

Testing, testing.

Naturally you will need to have a working sound system on your PC to use Festival. Let’s make sure Festival is working. Open up a terminal window again and issue the command:

echo "Would you like to play a game?" | festival --tts

NOTE: Hopefully you know what the above quote is from. ;-)

If you heard the synthesized voice Festival is working. Now let’s have Festival read from a text file. Create a text file with some content and save the file as test.txt. Now, back in the terminal window, issue the command:

festival --tts test.txt

You should be hearing the synthesized voice reading back your text for you.

PDFs

With Festival working properly you can also read PDFs with the help of Adobe reader. With Adobe reader installed you can open up a PDF and then click View > Read Out Loud to enable text to speech on a document. With this system you can pause, read entire documents, read only a page, and more.

Final thoughts

You can really have fun with the Festival system. You could set up alarms (using the at command) to wake you with a special synthesized alarm clock and much more. But text to speech isn’t just for fun or research. Remember, there is a world of computer users out there who rely on systems like this. Fortunately the Linux community has this need covered.

Speak It was a very popular Firefox add-on. It is listed to be compatible with Firefox 2 only at the official Mozilla homepage but a user changed the compatibility of the add-on and made it compatible with Firefox 3 as well.

It utilizes text to speech capabilities of the operating system to provide the means to read out text aloud to the user. It integrates itself nicely in the right-click context menu and can be used to read out all of the text on a website or only the selected text.

It comes with some options to configure the add-on. It is possible to change the read rate and volume. There is also the possibility to change the text to speech engine if more than one engine is installed on the computer system.

Most options are available after registering to the service which is rather hassle free. Once you’ve done that you can access the main page where you can make a decision about the type of text to speech service that you want to use. Several general options are available that customize the output further.

It is possible to select one speaker out of 15 available ones. Male and female speakers are available as well as speakers with accents (US, UK and Indian) and Spanish and French speakers. The reading speed can be changed as well, you can slow it down by a maximum of 25% and speed it up by up to 70%.

My test recordings took less than a minute to generate but it surely depends on the size of the text. Once the recording is done it is accessible online in an embedded media player but it can also be downloaded as an mp3 file or embedded on another website. A Podcast column is available as well which was not clickable at the time of this writing. Recordings can be deleted as well.

The option to convert websites to speech is nice but you should avoid websites with lots of menus and stuff. I did a test with an article at Ghacks and everything was processed. The menu was included as well as the footer. If the website has a print option use that because this normally comes without menu and other stuff. If there is nothing like that you might want to consider copying and pasting the text instead.

The speech itself is well done. You still notice that the speaker is a computer and not a real human, especially between words. The words itself are pronounced very nicely as far as I can tell.