text to speech

Hi Anne,

Articulate does not have this built in currently.  You need an external text to speech app.  Then you can insert the audio.  There was a VERY old thread in the old forums that gave some ideas: http://www.articulate.com/forums/articulate-presenter/1943-text-speech.html.  You might also export the audio output from Captivate and import.  If you have a Mac, then you can use the voice capability there as well.  No, there is not a Mac version of Articulate, just for clarity

Thanks, Robert.  That's what i was afraid of. 

Hi Anne,

I've been experimenting with a lot of text to speech software recently and tried many in the market (AT&T, Nuance, Loquendo). Finally I came across a software that is amazingly high quality and at ridiculously low cost.

Check out Speak It! from Future Apps (http://www.future-apps.net/main/Future_Apps.html). They have a Mac version now. I don't have a Mac sadly, so I bought the iPhone app for 1.99. It's a pain to mail the scripts to my phone then have the app create an audio file which I have to re-email to myself. But the quality is amazing, even with the built in default voices. Sometimes I even forget it is a computer voice speaking.

I have to rapidly deploy several process training modules in my organization currently and this might be a viable option once I get my bosses to buy-in. Our courses get quite lengthy so outsourcing the recording or even doing it in-house will be extremely time-consuming. Most of our listeners are non-native English speaking, so the British voices are nice and clean and easy to pick up.

Although the American voices might suit your needs better (my advice is to use the Male American voice, the female one still sounds pretty robotic).

Hope this helps!

Edward

I've used http://www.ivona.com/ for scratch recording (getting stuff a good ear test before sending off to the narrator). This is reasonable for temporary audio, but for distribution it's relatively costly ($800).

Coincidentally, I found the SpeakIt tool while toying with my iPad last night. I'm relatively impressed and will be looking into this route. If it's reasonably priced without restrictions on distribution, I'll give it serious consideration for replacement of my ivona scratch process.

Thanks Edward.  I have an iPad so i'll check it out.

Since the material I create is under a government contract, we have to meet 508 compliance. I meet this by providing a link on the opening page to a pdf of the presentation which is screen reader compatible.

Mike

Hi Anne

I use NaturalReader 9 from Natural Soft.........takes a little getting used to in that some of the text has to be spelt "phonetically"

Eamonn

You can also try to use the Google feature and record it by using the stereo mixing of your PC and a audio editing software.

Here is an example (hope the link works fine) of Google TTS feature (Just press the audio icon below the text box).

Here is a screencast I made that explain how to record live audio from your PC.

Note: dunno if there are some licence restrictions.

thanks everyone...this is giving me a good headstart on my project!

Cepstral is ok. We actually use it for automated dialing with a text to speech script.

http://www.cepstral.com/

DSpeech is a good free tool. Paste text in and export an mp3.

http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/

However the software is only as good as the voices you install on your PC. To get the latest good quality voices I could only find ones you need to pay for. Great selection here:-

http://www.nextup.com/index.html

Text to speech has come a long way and can save greatly on production time.