Have you ever heard about Artificial intelligence (AI)? According to Wikipedia, it is intelligence demonstrated by machines, unlike the natural intelligence displayed by humans and animals.
Natural Voices For Textaloud
A lot of enterprises are using automated services with natural voices for their business. It cuts the cost of human resources and increases profit and speed (I know, it is not good news for everyone). With the dynamic, flexible, and adaptive modern business, the entrepreneurs have the reason to use AI Text To Speech service for their business nowadays.
Text to speech software enables you to have text read out loud on a computer. Panopreter is an intuitive and easy to use text to speech software for Windows users. It reads any text aloud with natural voices, supports reading the text you selected in any other software windows and copied to the Windows clipboard. Moreover, it converts the text to mp3, wav, ogg and flac audio files, thus you can listen to the audio files with a portable media player device later at your convenience. The software runs locally on your computer, the text will not be sent over the Internet.
Panopreter speaks using the default Microsoft text to speech voices pre-installed on the Windows operating systems. The latest Windows 10 comes with dozens of text to speech voices in different languages, you will get these speech synthesis voices by installing the corresponding language packs. Here are the details about the voices and steps to install the Windows language packs. On Windows 8 or 8.1, there are three text to speech voices available: Microsoft David (US male), Zira (US female) and Hazel (UK female). On Windows 7 and Vista, the text to speech voice is Microsoft Anna (US female). Besides these voices, a wide variety of languages, and voices produced by other companies are supported.
NaturalReader is a downloadable text-to-speech desktop software for personal use. This easy-to-use software with natural-sounding voices can read to you any text such as Microsoft Word files, webpages, PDF files, ePub ebooks. It offers a free version, and 3 paid versions which can export the texts into MP3 audios. Personally speaking, if you just need to use the basic function of text to speech, there is no need for payment of the paid version. And a piece of better news is that it even offers an online text to speech reader.
Balabolka is a totally free Text-To-Speech (TTS) program. It can save narrations as audio files in a range of formats including MP3 and WAV. For lengthy documents, you can create bookmarks to make it easy to jump back to a specific location. And you can customize the narrator by choosing among all computer voices installed on your computer. Besides, you can also split the text and convert it to multiple audio files.
The Zabaware Text-to-Speech Reader is an application that uses a speech synthesizer to read documents out loud. It is available for free with generic voices or sold with high-quality CereProc or AT&T Natural Voices at the lowest prices in the industry..
This is an addendum to the original post: I should clarify that the base price of TextAloud includes only the default Microsoft voices, and the TextAloud interface and help files are available only in English. However, you can purchase premium voices for 29 languages, and with different regional accents (i.e. Scottish English). The voices range in price (most of the non-English voices are $45 each), and you can sample them before you buy.
Voice options: The voices that come with the free version are all very grating. They are especially robotic sounding and quite difficult to listen to for prolonged periods of time. The software promises that the best voices are reserved for the paid version.
If you find yourself spending way too much time reading during the day, TextAloud can increase your efficiency. However, the free voices are grating enough that it may be worth the upgrade to the paid version.
Engage global audiences by using 400 neural voices across 140 languages and variants. Bring your scenarios like text readers and voice-enabled assistants to life with highly expressive and human-like voices. Neural Text to Speech supports several speaking styles including newscast, customer service, shouting, whispering, and emotions like cheerful and sad.
Differentiate your brand with a unique custom voice. Develop a highly realistic voice for more natural conversational interfaces using the Custom Neural Voice capability, starting with 30 minutes of audio. Here are a few examples of organizations that are doing AI voice generation today:
I have been using Ivona Studio for the past couple of years, and actually had really good success with it (especially considering I could customize pronunciation using ssml tags). However, my voice licenses expires in a few days and upon trying to renew, I was told that they (Ivona) no longer supports these offline products. As a result, I am now in the process of investigating NextUp's TextAloud (which also includes some Nuance voices - that's an added bonus) and ReadSpeaker SpeechMaker (recommended to me by Ivona).I will be glad to share with you any information I get regarding these 2 products. If you have discovered any other option that you think is viable, I would certainly love to hear!
You can load additional voices other than Ivona. If you are using a PC (vs a Mac), Microsoft actually includes a couple of default TTS voices, one being Zira. I played around with an audio file, playing it one time using the Ivona voice and then playing it using the Microsoft Zira voice. Believe it or not, I actually found that I like the *FREE* Microsoft Zira voice better -- to me, it sounded a bit more natural.
We will likely purchase all 5 Ivona voices (though we have predominitely used Salli), as well as the Allison voice from Nuance. At this time, we probably won't invest in the compatible AT&T or Acapela voices, but those are options.
I have learned a few tricks that may save you some frustration. First, the free voices are not good enough: Pay for the better quality voices. Second, take a few minutes to preview the parts of the article that won't appear in the audio version: the illustrations, tables, and figures. Finally, I use TextAloud's utility to cut the document into four-minute tracks so I can repeat or restart segments easily.
It is no surprise that struggling students need more engagement with print. Providing TTS is a natural support to facilitate more reading. For early readers and young learners of English, digital storybooks provide a fun and interactive engagement with books. Older readers can utilize TTS to access motivating and content-specific texts on the Internet and textbook-related Web portals that are so important to vocabulary and background knowledge development.
The brain decodes information in an integrated double hemisphere process 11 . Badzakova-Trajkov G, Häberling IS, Roberts RP, Corballis MC. Cerebral asymmetries: complementary and independent processes. PloSOne. 2010;5:e9682. . In this functional organization, each cerebral hemisphere is specialized in some functions and plays a critical and complementary role where interhemispheric communication is very important 22 . Arteaga C, Poblano A. Handedness of children determines preferential facial and eye movements related to hemispheric specialization. Arq Neuropsiquiatr 2008;66:488-493. . The left hemisphere is specialized in verbal-auditory analysis, while the right hemisphere decodes non-verbal stimuli. Language functions related to right hemisphere processing are primarily pragmatics; analysis of prosodic information; recognition of voices, natural sounds, melodies; and the processing of simple and complex auditory patterns 33 . Taylor K, Regard M. Language in the right cerebral hemisphere: contributions from reading studies. News Physiol Sci 2003;18:257-261. .
The test of environmental sound (TES) has two subtests, the first corresponding to sounds produced by different unanimated objects (SPO) and the second, to characteristic sounds produced by the best known animals (SPA), without human voices. In both tests, ten single stimuli were presented in alternate fashion in each ear, and the subjects were asked to identify the nature of sound stimuli. In the SPO tests we included sounds produced by land, water, or air vehicles; phones ringing; water falling; fireguns; glasses broken, and other common sounds. In the SPA test we included sounds from known animals such as dogs, cats, cows, birds, lions, and other animals. The test has been validated in a previous report 1919 . Romero-Díaz A, Peñaloza-López Y, García-Pedroza F, Pérez SJ, Castro-Camacho W. Central auditory processes evaluated with psychoacoustic tests in normal children. Acta Otorrinolaringol Esp 2011;62:418-424. . We determined the percentage of correct answers. 2ff7e9595c
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