Computer Voices: Let your machine read to you
By: Gary S. Kearney
You or a friend reading aloud helps edit and find errors. If you can't find a reader, computers can do it for you. A Google search can find stand alone programs, or speech recognition programs, which commonly convert text to speech in addition to converting speech into text.
http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/
There's a free demo at this site that may be worth checking to see if you like text-to-speech or even for occasional use.
http://www.nextup.com/
NextUp.com, a division of NextUp Technologies, LLC, markets innovative voice synthesis software for Windows that is designed to save time and deliver vital information.
The award winning TextAloud MP3 lets you listen to text from email, web pages, reports, eBooks and more while you work on something else. Even better, save your daily reading on MP3 audio files for portable devices so you can get away from your desk and listen anytime, anyplace.
http://readplease.com/
ReadPlease is a product of ReadPlease Corporation, a Canadian company specializing in text-to-speech software. Their product ReadPlease is one of the most popular downloads on the Internet today. The company has been involved with custom text-to-speech solutions with CorMac Technologies Inc. These include a custom text-to-speech application (multi-language) for the US Navy That application is called "Battlefield Voice Simulator" and is currently in use on the USS Enterprise.
You can download a free version of the program. (10MB) Other languages are available. This is my choice for beginners.
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