You don’t like your own voice on recordings, yet you cannot afford or have no time to hire a professional voice-over? Install colorzilla chrome. Here is wonderful software that almost gets it right:. This software turns text into speech with voices that are way more sophisticated then any speech software of your Operating system.
It is available for both Mac and PC. Have a look at this video and you will find out this is much better then any robot voice you ever heard: Of course it is not perfect and you may have to adapt the spelling if the voice pronounces some words in a strange way.
But I think you agree that this is an acceptable result and actually far better then what I do myself if I record video tutorials, for instance. ? The software works with NaturalVoice voices from several software houses, like at&t, Neospeech and Acapela. You can buy extra voices for a reasonable fee or select a package with two NaturalVoices included, like I did.
The voice I used in the video above was Lucy, a UK voice from Acapela. For the fun of it, I called her Lucy Acapella. There is also a Graham male voice in my package but he is not that good. He puts the wrong emphasis almost everywhere. He is only good for short sentences. The PC version has US, UK, French, Spanish, German, Swedish, Italian and Arabic voices while Mac has US, UK, French and Spanish. The pronunciation per language is quite convincing.
Here you can test the voices yourself:. For some reason, the Mac version is more expensive then the PC version, but it is still very affordable. Typical problems Wrong emphasis is the big give away of robot voices and although the NaturalVoice series do a good job, you do not escape from awkward sentences here and there.
You can get rid of it by trying to formulate your sentences differently until is sounds natural. Another problem is that some words are cut off too soon.
To avoid that, you need to be imaginative with spelling. It can also help to slow down speed here and there. You can vary the speed anywhere you like, thanks to the Conversation Control Panel: It let’s you change speaker, insert pauses and change the speed. So, if you have a long text, you can vary voices and speed. Using dots helps as well. There is also the Pronunciation panel that lets you save words with phonetic spelling or you can create shortcuts: As you can see above, I changed the word Giclees into jeeklays to force the voice to pronounce it properly.
Since the word is saved in the list, it will automatically use the custom pronunciation as soon as the software encounters the word Giclees. That way you can correct a lot mistakes with uncommon words. The Acapela group has a tutorial on TTS voices output: that you may find useful. I rewrote quite lot of sentences, not only because emphasis was placed on the wrong words, also because it did not sound right. And that brings me to the next topic: as an aid to improve your writing.
Series III 109' V8 (Stage I). The chassis number can be found on the firewall in the engine bay and on the right hand front spring hanger. (Though Daryl Webb claims 'LHR' whatever that means). 90, 110, 130 & Defenders: Found in the behind Rover's left front corner of the windshield. Stamped on plate. Land rover chassis numbers series.
NaturalReader helps proofreading You would be surprised how different text and speech is. Having a voice-over proofread what you have written helps to pinpoint awkward writing as you hear it being said. I’m not a native English speaker although I lived in the UK for a long time.
So, my English is wobbly most of the time. Yet, when I run a text past, I hear immediately something is wrong. It is only a matter of changing the wording until it sounds right.
That is an added bonus I did not count on when I bought this software. Proofreading with a professional voice-over would be quite expensive. Imagine hiring a voice-over, you let him/her test a few sentences and then discover that it needs rewriting. Corrections have to be paid extra, so if you want to work with real voices, running a test upfront with helps you prepare your texts upfront and you can even do that at night.
Voice-overs that never sleep Another advantage is that your voice-over can work day and night, rehearse a thousand times without getting tired or annoyed and you do not need to pay overtime. And most importantly, they are there whenever you need hem. No booking time involved. License fee versus real cost I actually got my license fee out of it with the first video. The video above is a bit more then 3 minutes, so count on it that you pay at least $200.00 for a real voice to cover a video like that. I bought the package of two voices for only $69.50 USD (Mac version). The links in this article are no affiliate links, by the way, I have no stake in this software.
Real voice-over versus software True, a real voice-over professional will do it a lot better since humans are vastly superior in their capacity to express emotion, but if you compare this software with what it produced a few years ago, you will be stunned at the evolution. Soon, you will no longer hear the difference and real voice-overs make mistakes too. I worked with quite a few of them in the past and a common problem is that they can sound like they are reading text instead of talking spontaneously. NaturalVoice voices are not reading, they speak, be it in their own funny way, but they have a bright future ahead. So, investing in software like this will help us all in the long run.
I agree there is an ethical problem in a sense that you take away jobs in the voice-over industry, but that is happening in many fields. I created realistic illustrations for ad agencies many years ago, and I was moved aside by Photoshop. Did that ruin my life? No, I just changed over to something else: multimedia. Never looked back ever since. Whether you like it or not, robots are gaining on us and it does not help to work against this evolution because it is going to happen anyway. How about Support?
Support for the software is poor. I asked them if there was a way to influence how emphasis is placed on certain words but I never received a reply. However, the software is so easy to use that you do not need support, except for this unanswered question, that is. I suspect they have no answer for this one currently. In any case, I give software a well deserved 4 stars for excellence.
If their support was responsive, it would have gained 5 stars. Hi smrutims, It depends what kind of videos you mean. You have screen recorded tutorials, “talking head”- videos and documentary style videos. Screen recording is used to explain software. Talking heads are good to explain ideas, documentary style is more elaborate, with action, flow charts and what not.
How to make a good video requires investigation. I suggest you go to Vimeo and pick any subject you find interesting and view a couple of educational videos. You will find that some are good, and some are not. Write down what you like and dislike about the videos and use that experience to create your own. When your videos are good, you will get more visitors automatically, but you can give it a boost by following the articles on.
You do not need to buy into his programs, just read his articles and observe what he actually does on his own blog. I hope that helps? Hi Eystein, I see they moved the conversation control to the professional version now. In that case, try insert this to change voice: Vce=Speaker=Graham where “Graham” is the name of the voice. Pau=1000 to insert a pause of 1 second RSpd=140 to speedup the speaking. RSpd=86 to slow it down. “100” is standard.
It’s not sure it will work, but you can give it a try. If it works in version 11, these commands normally take effect from the point they are inserted. You can put them anywhere in the text and as often you like. If you want it to say Volts, you have to spell it out. Their claim about reading existing text just like that it over-optimistic, but to be honest, no other software does it better. Hi Veda, I never said NaturalReader owns the voices, they are from several software houses and you need to follow the license agreement in each instance. But when I bought those voices, there was no limitation on their use.
In the meantime, NeoSpeech and Acapela seem to have changed their business model and provide now their own speech software. Is certainly an alternative, but I prefer to work directly from my local computer instead of via the cloud, forcing you to connect via the internet each time you want to use the application.
'If you have every tried the built in text to speech software on your computer you know how frustrating listening to it can be. There are a few more pleasant sounding text to speech apps out there, but short of speaking everything yourself and uploading it to your own website there was no easy solution to this problem. That is until I can across Acapela Group Virtual Speaker. They offer a wide variety of voice variants with options for extra emotion as well as a whole host of different languages.
Now I can give all my clients a text to speech option that makes it much easier for them to stay updated on my post on the go.' 'I am never home.I travel for work, sometimes by car, sometimes by plane. Love read to me. It lets me load articles that I can listen to while on the go. Need to do some research, need to run two miles. Do them both simultaneously. Load articles, start running and listen away.
Natural Reader Download Voices
Love that I can 'multi' multitask. Never waste a minute. On the phone with business colleague, they say 'Hey did you read.' Now with Read2Me, you can load the article and read later, no worrying about remembering what you wanted to read. Read2Me has made me so much more efficient with my time. I also love classic rock, use Read2Me to load article about the latest rockers while I sit at the pool and tan. 'The best this about Voicepaper is how easy it is to use.
I personally to read, but it is nice to be able to mash a few buttons and hear an article, and not worry about running into anyone while I am walking. The interface is intuitive, it can be used for a few minutes before purchase, and the voice is not, well, it doesn't sound like Roz from Monsters, Inc. (But I might enjoy if that was possible sometimes!). For the number of channel options and the overall price (around nine dollars), I like it. I give it two thumbs up for anyone who might walk or run and likes articles over music.' 'MWS Reader 5 is in my experience the best one!
You can load many many different voices with a high range of characteristics and quality. There are so many special functions and so many possibilities, it is by far the best software out there.
You can listen to any text, even to scanned books using the integrated OCR. Test it yourself! P.S.: It has a great support.
He explained me half an hour long how to do that and that. Pros: - many special functions and so many possibilities - many different voices with a high range of characteristics and quality'. Thank you for your contribution! Your question has been sent to our community of users. Summary Best text to speech software Rank Solutions Type Votes Price 1 Amazon Polly Software 200 Paid 2 NaturalReader Software 170 Free 3 Zabaware Text To Speech Reader Software 163 Free 4 Read the Words Software 140 Free 5 iSpeech Software 136 Free 6 Acapela Group Virtual Speaker Software 116 Free 7 Voice Reader Software 101 Paid 8 Read2Me Websites 98 Paid 9 AudioBookMaker Software 75 Free 10 TextSpeechPro Software 75 Free.
CereProc Based in Scotland Scottish, Irish, celebrity, Spanish, Japanese, Natural Reader Based in Canada Lots of voices: US, british, French, Swedish, etc – all $39.99 per pack/dialect Install directly into Window for use with any TTS engine Acapela group Offices in Belgium, France and Sweden Childrens’ voices available Proprietary API that is platform based (Win 7&8 vs Win 8 specifically) Nuance Vocalizer Proprietary API Can’t find voices specifically for sale/distribution AT&T Natural Voices Business sold to Interactions? Difficult to find info on voices. Re-posting info from (thanks ): Assuming there is a internet connection, we can just use Google TTS API (e.g. ) It should be fast enough and I think it covers all languages as Google Translate The link is the example of HTTP request. You just make HTTP to translate.google.com/translatetts setting tl=language (two letters shortcut for language) and query=whatdoyouwanttosay (make sure you escape this string). HTTP response have Content-Type:audio/mpeg so from response you can get audio file.
Then you just pass that file to system to play it (I'm don't really know C# but this should be easy). Here are some useful links: I don't have access to Windows now, so I can't implement this, but if you want I can write you a class that implements IAudioService and use this approach.
But you'll have to check it and probably debug it. Just ping me here if you need that.
Also, I'll have access to windows in month so if this issue is still open I'll develop a feature. I would like to split out the IAudioService as it's currently in breach of the single responsibility principle. There should really be an interface and class for playing sounds and an interface and multiple classes for speech.
Then I can just swap out one speech service for another, and even nest them so we can fall back to Microsoft TTS if there is no active internet connection, for example. I've been having a look at the free voices available and found some that haven't been mentioned. The MBROLA voices can be. This works okay but the MBROLA license agreement has to be accepted every time the pc is restarted. which is again SAPI5 and has a. I think the English Alan voice is fairly nice (haven't tried the other languages). which provides a SAPI5 interface for the HMM based voice models built by HTS.
It currently only has a German voice but if the other HTS voices can be added it should be quite good. has quite nice voices in quite a few languages but isn't SAPI5 (or 4). It's a java server with an HTTP interface. Of all the free voices I've come across this seems to be the nicest sounding and the most active in development. There's even the possibility of using it in conjunction with MBROLA (this was possible in version 4 and might be brought back in version 6).
I've successfully hacked it into OptiKey and I believe it works fairly well. Shall I make a new issue to discuss how it should be properly integrated?
Text To Voice Reader
On Sat, 22 Jul 2017, 09:58 William,.@. wrote: I've been having a look at the free voices available and found some that haven't been mentioned. The MBROLA voices can be used with espeak to make them SAPI5. This works okay but the MBROLA license agreement has to be accepted every time the pc is restarted. RHVoice which is again SAPI5 and has a few languages.
Natural Voice Reader Online
I think the English Alan voice is fairly nice (haven't tried the other languages). SALB which provides a SAPI5 interface for the HMM based voice models built by HTS ( ). It currently only has a German voice but if the other HTS voices can be added it should be quite good. MaryTTS has quite nice voices in quite a few languages but.isn't. SAPI5 (or 4). It's a java server with an HTTP interface. Of all the free voices I've come across this seems to be the nicest sounding and the most active in development.
There's even the possibility of using it in conjunction with MBROLA (this was possible in version 4 and might be brought back in version 6). I've successfully hacked it into OptiKey and I believe it works fairly well. Shall I make a new issue to discuss how it should be properly integrated?
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