An additional factor in how natural sounding the voice will be is the quality and quantity of sound samples used. This makes them great for downloading easily and not requiring a lot of resources. The trade-off is in the depth and richness of the sound they generate.
This allows the program to do a much better job approximating human speech with a large number of high-quality samples to build from. The trade-off is these require a great deal of disk space and more CPU power to create real-time speech.
Normally users never need to know about these interfaces. However, there are two versions of SAPI, with varying abilities, and with different support from different engines. TextAloud supports both, however, some engines and some features are only supported in one or the other. SAPI4 is the earlier version of the standard. It is supported by all of the voices created before , and some created later. SAPI4 will work on most Windows computers. These include the ability to change voices within a single article of text for example, to create a script read by multiple characters , the ability to insert pitch and speech changes into the text, and additional specialized TAGs for manipulating speech further.
For example, Neospeech voices do not support the advanced pronunciation editor. Windows 98 ships with SAPI4. If neither is available, TextAloud will warn you and give you directions for installing one or the other.
When these sounds are digitized, they are sampled and converted to numbers. The rate at which they are sampled is the sample rate. That sounds a little complicated, and it is. The only part you really need to remember is that each voice engine has a natural sample rate. This rate is represented as a number, 8kHz, 11kHz, 16kHz, or 22kHz. There are a couple of uses where this sample rate does matter though. Telephony usage, where voices are played over the phone, such as with voice menu systems or computer based answer machines, typically require 8kHz voices.
While 16kHz voices sound best on the computer, either 8kHz or 16kHz will work fine when played within TextAloud. However, voices purchased for telephony usage should be 8kHz. The other area where sample rates become important is when creating audio files for certain portable uses. See Creating Audio Files later in this document for further discussion of this. But, within a given engine, higher Bitrates sound better. In the following sections when we detail commonly available voices, available languages will be listed.
Each voice has a native language. So for example, if you have English text and use a Spanish voice, you will not hear the Spanish version of that text. Likewise, voices do not do a good job of reading a language other than the one it was designed for. Using English text with a French voice will not give you English with a French accent, it will give you mostly gibberish.
We recommend mb or more of memory for these voices. If you have other speech products, you may have received other voices, such as those from IBM or ScanSoft. While we have tested with as many voices as possible, if you find you have additional voices and they do not seem to work properly in TextAloud, email us at [email protected] for assistance.
A voice is assigned to each article added to TextAloud. This voice can be changed via the Voice Dropdown list on the main window. What sounds good to one user may not be intelligible to another. TextAloud has many features to allow you to improve the sound. The most important thing you can do is upgrade to one or more of the higher-quality voices listed above.
Additionally, TextAloud easily allows you to adjust the speed, pitch and volume on voices with the sliders on the main window. Most users, as they become accustomed to listening to TextAloud will gradually increase the speed of speech to enable faster reading. Also see later sections on the Basic and Advanced pronunciation editors to assist with any words that the voices mispronounce.
Multi Article mode need to be understood. It may be a single news story, a single document, a single paragraph, whatever you want it to be. The point is, it is dealt with as a single entity within TextAloud. This means it is a chunk of text that is dealt with as one and is given a single title.
Understanding this concept helps understand the remainder of this document. If you open a text file into TextAloud, that becomes a single article. If you copy an entire news story to TextAloud using the clipboard, that becomes a single article.
Most users will keep TextAloud in Multi Article mode as detailed in the next section. However, there are situations where a user may want to use Single Article Mode. In Single Article Mode, you can only deal with one article at a time. Anytime a new article is loaded, the previous article is deleted. If you typically deal with only one thing you may want to hear, then once it is done, you are going off to look for something else, then single article mode may be simpler.
Each article is automatically assigned a title based on the first few words in the article. You can change this article title by overwriting it in the Title Field. When a new article is added, the new article is displayed, but all previous articles are still available within TextAloud. You can change to a previously added article using the Article List dropdown at the top of the window. As mentioned, most users prefer Multi Article Mode because it builds a queue of articles. Then when ready, you can listen to individual articles, your complete list of articles, or easily create audio files from the entire list of articles.
TextAloud Toolbar — These icons provide quick access to commonly used menu items. The last two buttons on this icon provide information about TextAloud for schools and Language support.
These are primarily marketing vehicles, and you may right-click these buttons and choose Hide on the popup menu to remove these two icons. Click this dropdown list to see the full list of all articles currently in TextAloud, then select an article title to load it into the main window.
Article Title — This field is the Title of the current article. Article titles are generated based on the first few words of an article when the article is first loaded. You can change the title by typing in this field.
NOTE: The article title becomes the filename when creating audio files. Voice Dropdown — The voice dropdown shows the voice selected for the current article. You can click this field to select a different voice from enabled voices.
When you change the voice, the speed and pitch settings on the right of the screen will be adjusted to the saved values for that voice. TextAloud Text Area — This area is where text of the current article is displayed. When manually creating an article, type or paste in this area. You may edit text in this area, and several actions are available on a popup menu when you right-click in this area.
Status Bar — The status bar at the bottom of the window will often provide helpful status information such as the number of current articles or progress indicators during speaking. Pitch Slider — This area contains a slider to allow easy adjustment of the pitch for the current voice. Note that some voices do not support pitch adjustments, as shown in the figure above. Changing a value here will adjust the default pitch for the current voice, so the new value will be used anytime that voice is selected.
Speed Slider — Use this slider to speed up or slow down speaking when using the current voice. All voices support speed adjustments. You will notice the ranges shown will vary based on voice and SAPI version they support.
Changing a value here will adjust the default speed for the current voice. This is the same volume that is shown if you bring up the Windows mixer by doubleclicking the speaker icon in the system tray area near the clock on the Windows start bar.
Changes here are not voice specific but change Windows volume settings for most audio programs. Text Scrollbar — If the current article has more text than can be shown within the TextAloud window, this scrollbar will appear and can be used to navigate up and down the text of the article. Multi Article Scrollbar — When TextAloud has more than one article, use this scrollbar to navigate to different articles. This is useful to move to the next or previous article, or a quick method to the first or last.
To move to a particular article, using the Article List Dropdown is easier since you can identify the articles by title. There are also settings there to dictate when the floating toolbar will be displayed, and whether the toolbar should always stay on top of other windows to keep it available for use.
Programs that are running frequently place an icon here to provide you quick access to the program and its functions. Anytime TextAloud is running, it places a small TextAloud icon in the system tray, recognizable as a red T and a speaker icon.
You can double-click this icon at any time to bring the TextAloud main window open and to the top of other windows. This will make sure it is always available, which is important if you often use with Clipboard Watching or HotKeys from within other programs without interacting with the TextAloud main window first. The selected file will be imported into TextAloud as a new article.
You may also select multiple files if in Multi Article Mode to import multiple articles at one time. Article Title will be the filename. One item to note with Adobe Acrobat files is that some PDF files have been copy protected by the author, preventing other programs including TextAloud from extracting text.
If you open a very large document, you may see text within the TextAloud window noting that the document was too large to import directly into TextAloud, and that it will be referenced in the external file. While this message appears to be an error message, this is simply a possibly over-cautious protection included in TextAloud to prevent huge documents from taking too much of Windows resources.
The document will still be spoken as other articles, but text will not be highlighted within the TextAloud window. This protection mechanism is primarily included within TextAloud to protect older Windows systems. This is a global shared memory area where text or other objects can be copied to, then used in other programs. Copying text to the Windows clipboard can be done from within most programs that allow viewing of text. Copying text to the Windows clipboard involves first highlighting the text of interest, then performing the actual copy to the Windows clipboard.
When Clipboard Watching is turned on, TextAloud monitors the Windows clipboard for changes, and can automatically speak or import the copied text into TextAloud, or can pop up a window to give you options on what to do with the text. For example, if you typically only use TextAloud for longer news stories, you might set this value to , and any clipboard copies of less than characters will be ignored by TextAloud.
TextAloud will only act on copies of more than characters. Some Microsoft programs, including Internet Explorer, have bugs that cause them to send duplicate clipboard messages often. For example, each time you close an internet explorer window, the Windows clipboard will act as if a program has copied text to the clipboard, even though the contents of the clipboard will not change. Checking this will cause TextAloud to completely ignore duplicate copies.
However, a side-effect of this is if you manually copy identical text to the clipboard twice in a row, TextAloud will ignore the second copy. The Clipboard Prompt Window is described in detail below. When unchecked, the prompt will not be displayed and the Default Action will be performed automatically. Using this setting you can specify how long the window should be displayed. For example, if you specify 3 seconds, the window will be displayed for 3 seconds. This gives you 3 seconds to click a button to specify what you want to do with the text.
If you do not click within 3 seconds, the window will close and the Default Action will be executed. If you need longer to decide what to do, increase this time so the window will be displayed longer.
Options for this default action are: o New — Automatically import the clipboard text into TextAloud as a new article. This is useful for example if you are copying a news story from Internet Explorer, but you bring it in as two separate copies in order to skip over some advertisement text.
The right side of the panel, where 2 is displayed in this example, is a counter that counts down the number of seconds before the window will close automatically and the default action will be taken. Common Clipboard Watching Setups For most users, one of two clipboard setups will be most commonly used. This will cause TextAloud to automatically speak any text over characters that is copied to the clipboard.
Note that when doing other work that may use the clipboard often, you can easily turn of clipboard watching by rightclicking the TextAloud system tray icon, choosing Options, and unchecking Watch Clipboard. It is also important to note that clipboard watching is often too intrusive for some users who often use the Windows clipboard when performing tasks unrelated to TextAloud. For these users we recommend that clipboard watching be turned off, and instead HotKeys be used for dealing with text from other programs in TextAloud.
HotKeys will be detailed in a later section. Manual Typing or Pasting In addition to the more automatic methods of creating new articles in TextAloud, you may also manually create articles. This will create a blank article. A default title will be generated but can be overwritten in the Title edit box. Next, within the Text Area, you can manually type in contents of the article.
In addition you can use Cut, Copy, and Paste within this area similar to the way you can within any text editing program. A HotKey is somewhat like a global shortcut key.
Once this is defined, you can work within any program, highlight some text, then press Control-Alt-Shift-N, and the highlighted text will automatically be imported into TextAloud as a new article. Using this Import New HotKey gives you an easy way to create new articles while working in Documents, Email, or other text programs without having to use Clipboard Watching, which can sometimes become annoying.
After installing TextAloud 2. The 3rd icon in this toolbar looks like a printed document with a folded corner. When viewing a web page within Internet Explorer, if you select text within the browser window, then click this button, a new TextAloud article will be created containing the highlighted text. If no text is selected within Internet Explorer, then pressing the Create button will create a new article in TextAloud containing all of the text from the displayed web page.
TextAloud will switch to the first article and begin speaking. If Word Highlighting is turned on, as you hear a word spoken, it will be highlighted within the text area. Click any of those to resume speaking. Additionally, because each listener has different listening skills and preferences, judging the quality of speech is a very personal and subjective process.
TextAloud provides dozens of features and tools to help you customize the speech in order to customize and improve speech. Review that section and mentioned voices to insure the voices you have on your computers are the voices that sound best to you. TextAloud provides flexible options for selecting voices. Some users find a single voice they enjoy most and want each article to be spoken by that voice. Some users find that having each article spoken with a different voice makes the process less monotonous, much like when listening to a news cast, anchors take turns reading stories.
Note that this volume is different than the Windows mixer volume slider available on the TextAloud main window. This volume setting also affects volume of the voice when creating audio files. Note that you may also edit the Pitch, Speed, and Volume for a voice by right-clicking in the text area of TextAloud, and choosing Edit Voice. The main use of this window is to enable only those voices you wish to use, disabling all other voices.
This is the voice shown on the Voice Dropdown when the article is selected in the main TextAloud window and is the voice that will be used to speak the article unless it is manually changed via that Voice Dropdown. For example, if you had Mary, Crystal, and Kate enabled, and you imported 6 new articles, voices might be assigned in this order: Mary, Crystal, Kate, Mary, Crystal, Kate … As noted, these settings are for the voice assignment when articles are created.
You can change the actual voice to be used at any time manually using the Voice Dropdown. TextAloud allows you to adjust the speed and pitch of speaking. This way, you can come back to listening right where you previously left. Ideal for listening to articles. In many aspects, synthesized speech has advantages over recorded podcasts.
Here are some: First of all - you have unlimited - free - content. That includes high-quality articles and books, that are not available on podcasts.
If you like listening on the go, as while driving or walking - get our free Android Text Reader App. TTSReader extracts the text from pdf files, and reads it out loud.
Also useful for simply copying text from pdf to anywhere. In addition, it highlights the text currently being read - so you can follow with your eyes. If you specifically want to listen to websites - such as blogs, news, wiki - you should get our free extension for Chrome. TTSReader enables exporting the synthesized speech with a single click. Continue reading. See All Posts. We have a full portpoflio of text-to-speech and speech-to-text applications and services. All our products are made with the scope of making life easier and funner.
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Upgrade to unleash your full creativity. Write something in this box and click play. If you have not already purchased TextAloud 4, you can add it to your purchase from the voice order form. NextUp Talker is a Text to Speech program specifically designed for people who have temporarily or permanently lost their voice.
With natural, human-sounding voices and convenient short-cuts to quickly enter commonly used sentences and phrases, NextUp Talker allows you to overcome vocal impairment by communicating with others using a Windows PC or Tablet PC. TextAloud Clock is a clock application that uses TextAloud to announce the current time and alarms.
For people who spend many hours on their Windows PC, it can help you avoid losing track of what time it is. TextAloud Clock is an add-on for TextAloud sold separately so you must have a registered copy of TextAloud on your PC before you can install and use it.
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