Text to Speech software

I'll throw in iSpeech's text to speech . In my opinion they have the most human sounding voices available, even a tad better than Ivona (although their Polish stuff is amazing). iSpeech offers quite a bit for free/very low fee. Might be just what you are looking for. They also offer some limited speech recognition should you ever need that. Their text to speech is top notch though. I used the service to turn my college reading into mp3s to listen to while cooking and similar when I couldn't read.

We use the text to speech in Captivate. They are pretty good. You will just need to give the pauses at the right places.

Thank you all for adding your responses.

Hello Joy,

I have found that no matter what TTS software or voice I use, there are far too many oddities in pronunciation to efficiently and cost effectively use one for narration. Besides, finding a professional narrator is easy, and depending on who you choose, it can be inexpensive as well.

Check out The Narrator Files. They price narration by the page, and they have exemplary voice talent.

Best!

Mike

On a related note: Use Google to generate foreign language audio files.

Amazing suggestions from articulates enthusiasts that's why i love E-Learning Heroes

Wondering if anyone here has used the TTS built into Microsoft Office to narrate for elearning?  Wonder if there would be a way to record the narration and then use it in an elearning course...

@Steve, wondering if you're using the built-in Mac voices in a similar way?

I am. I've switched over entirely from other TTS programs to Mac voices. Pretty neat trick I use to batch each file using terminal. It takes a little bit to set up my transcript input files, I haven't automated that part yet. 

Basically, when the script is approved, I generate a .txt file for each bit of audio (on the plus side, I have found a way to use this as a transcript feeder). Then I setup a batch file for terminal to automatically generate the outputs. The batch template lines look something like this:

say -v lee -f /Users/sflowers/Desktop/Dropbox/projectname/production/scratch_audio_scenarios/s1_c1.txt -o /Users/sflowers/Desktop/Dropbox/projectname/production/scratch_audio_scenarios/s1_c1.aiff

Copying and pasting this line into terminal will grab the text file and output an audio file in the voice I've selected. Copying and pasting multiple lines will do it multiple times. It only fails if there's a funny character or the text file is missing. Easy to pick up by the file size of the output .aiff. All in all pretty fast. And really easy to update. Just update the .txt file and copy / paste the batch line into terminal.

Another cool trick. To grab the path of a file, drag a file from the folder you want to locate into the terminal window. Copy and paste that into your text editor and you've got your path without having to wrack your brain or fiddle with finder.

Sounds sweet, but I'm on a PC rather than a Mac...  going to dig into this a bit and see if there is something equivalent that could be done