Is anyone familiar with any free (and reputable) text to speech tools that do not sound like an automated system, but that are somewhat convincing? I want something that will take PPT speaker notes and convert to audio fairly easily.
I know this is an old post, but this is a topic I've been thinking about a lot.
Professional narration is always going to trump text to speech in terms of quality, but there are reasons to use text to speech be it for previews before narration, speed of course production, reducing costs and of course accessibility.
There are roughly a dozen good on-demand text to speech (TTS) providers I'd say, or you also have the choice or converting text to mp3 files that never change and uploading with your content.
Once you've chosen the provider you like for quality of voice (they all have samples of voices on their sites) the next step is to determine if their costs are within your budget, most charge per word or you can use ResponsiveVoice which is free or a flat fee.
If quality is your #1 goal, then the next most important step is determining how much time you want to invest in making the voice sound great, and that involves massaging sentences by adding voice markup.
HTML5 Web Speech specifies the use of SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language). This is not available in every service and some use VoiceXML and other 'standards' too.
Storyline doesn't come with built in TTS, but it is built for flexibility, so integration to such services is possible. We've created an add-on to make it the easiest solution for the eLearning world.
Adobe Captivate has builtin TTS provided by Neospeech, neither have responded to my questions of which languages are available, so I can only say its good for English at this stage.
As you mentioned Powerpoint specifically Microsoft has builtin feature for having TTS read to you when you are in Powerpoint, but if you want TTS to be read as the presentation occurs you may need something like Powertalk (I have not tested this btw) which uses Microsoft's installed voices.
If your slide note text is not going to change often then use an online text to mp3 service here is a list of free services we've compiled.
So in essence it depends on your goals, if you want ease of production over adding that last few percentage points of quality then avoid using TTS with markup, if you want to spend 10x more time and get it just right then go for a service with SSML or similar markup.
You won't get TTS that's close enough to professionally narrated audio at this point, however I've heard some great examples which have been done using a high degree of markup artistry.
If you have any questions please reply here, I'm happy to share whatever I know that can assist.
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Here's a previous post covering a few options that various people have used ...
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Hi Erin,
I know this is an old post, but this is a topic I've been thinking about a lot.
Professional narration is always going to trump text to speech in terms of quality, but there are reasons to use text to speech be it for previews before narration, speed of course production, reducing costs and of course accessibility.
There are roughly a dozen good on-demand text to speech (TTS) providers I'd say, or you also have the choice or converting text to mp3 files that never change and uploading with your content.
Once you've chosen the provider you like for quality of voice (they all have samples of voices on their sites) the next step is to determine if their costs are within your budget, most charge per word or you can use ResponsiveVoice which is free or a flat fee.
If quality is your #1 goal, then the next most important step is determining how much time you want to invest in making the voice sound great, and that involves massaging sentences by adding voice markup.
HTML5 Web Speech specifies the use of SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language). This is not available in every service and some use VoiceXML and other 'standards' too.
Storyline doesn't come with built in TTS, but it is built for flexibility, so integration to such services is possible. We've created an add-on to make it the easiest solution for the eLearning world.
Adobe Captivate has builtin TTS provided by Neospeech, neither have responded to my questions of which languages are available, so I can only say its good for English at this stage.
As you mentioned Powerpoint specifically Microsoft has builtin feature for having TTS read to you when you are in Powerpoint, but if you want TTS to be read as the presentation occurs you may need something like Powertalk (I have not tested this btw) which uses Microsoft's installed voices.
If your slide note text is not going to change often then use an online text to mp3 service here is a list of free services we've compiled.
So in essence it depends on your goals, if you want ease of production over adding that last few percentage points of quality then avoid using TTS with markup, if you want to spend 10x more time and get it just right then go for a service with SSML or similar markup.
You won't get TTS that's close enough to professionally narrated audio at this point, however I've heard some great examples which have been done using a high degree of markup artistry.
If you have any questions please reply here, I'm happy to share whatever I know that can assist.
Kind regards,
Danny
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