Best free voice utilities
Text-to-voice utilities
Wouldn't it be nice if you could press a button and have all the new email in your in-box read to you in a pleasant human sounding voice while you were doing other work? And wouldn't it be nice if I could tell you a free program that does just that?
Well, I'm sorry, I can't.
Yes, there are a few free text-to-speech utilities available but they are quite basic in their interface and outright crude when it comes to voice quality. That's because the really hard part in producing a good text-to-voice program is the voice and the best "voices" are commercial products. Most of the free text-to-voice programs use free voices such as those from Microsoft and these sound distinctly robotic.
However, if you are prepared to tolerate this you can get good results with the freeware text-to-voice program Speakonia [1]. It comes with about 20 voices and will either read text aloud to you in real time or record the spoken results to a .WAV file for later replay. It uses the Microsoft voices which I would describe as "clear but annoying" unless, that is, you actually enjoy listening to Robots. The user interface is simple but not particularly convenient; it plays any text you've copied to the Clipboard.
If you can afford to buy a commercial product, then TextAloud is my top pick. At $29.95 it's reasonably priced, though you'll almost certainly want to purchase a commercial voice, such as one of the impressive AT&T "Natural Voices," as well. That will set you back another 35 bucks and 600MB of disk space.
With the use of one of these commercial voices, the spoken quality from TextAloud is surprisingly good and much better than Speakonia. Indeed, it exceeded my expectations. TextAloud also has a much better interface than Speakonia. It will read directly from Word, PDF, and HTML files and has plug-ins for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Outlook. It can also record directly to either MP3 or WMA audio files.
So if you really want your email read to you then this is the sort of money you are going to have to pay. Thanks to subscriber "WILTON" for the suggestion.
[1] http://www.cfs-technologies.com/home/?id=1.4 Freeware, all Windows versions, 2.6MB.[2] http://www.nextup.com/TextAloud/index.html Shareware, 20 day trial, Windows 98-Vista, 3.1MB.
Skype 2 final version released
The new version 2 of Skype, the wildly popular VoIP program, has finally been released. It's been in beta a while so it should be pretty solid. Features include improved voice quality, one-to-one video conversations, improved contacts organization and more. Freeware, Windows 2000 and later, 9.5MB.
http://www.skype.com/products/skype/windows/