TTS suggestions?

[TarnishedPenny]

I write in Word. I've been using Word's text-to-speach function, but it's pretty flat. I've looked online, but haven't found one I like. I'm looking for (1) free (yep, all kinds of Scott in my gene puddle) and (2) offers a decent sound and (3) can be used for more than a couple of hundred words without an account. That may be a lot to ask for, but it's always worth asking. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[HyunnaPark]

I use the one in Microsoft Edge. I don't use a PC for writing at all, but I use one so that I can use the TTS in Edge to read PDFs of Google Docs.

 

[YmaOHyd]

I was going to suggest Edge plus something like Online Notepad.

If you're okay with having an account and using (shudder) AI, ElevenLabs I think is the leading name in that space.

 

[OddLove]

I been using Balabolka. It only has two voices, man/woman. But you can adjust tone of voice and talking speed. It's one hundred percent free, I believe it's open source as people call it. Like VLC player or LibreOffice, so no annoying adds in the software. It's extremely basic and straightforward, and lacks probably tons of other features a speech to text paid software would offer. But I'm all about the 'free' and 'no sign ups' stuff, so I choose to use it over anything that's not free.

Only draw back is sometimes it will read words wrong in rare situations, for example, the word I have in BOLD might be spoked as 'Red' instead of 'Reed'. There's probably a way to fix that though, but since I just use it to help with proof reading my stuff, it doesn't matter.

[EDIT] also no word count limit as far as I know. I paste chapters upward of 10k words into it with no problem.

 

[redgarters]

I've been looking for an AI reader that can read stories in a natural sounding voice. There are some amazingly natural sounding voiceover applications around, but they are not meant for long text reading or web page reading in general. I've tried some of the TTS readers around and the obvious machine tint of them just makes me stop. What I'm looking for is as close to an audiobook experience as I can get (please save the 'AI is not the same as a real human responses'. I'm aware of all the issues, but I just don't have a human to read literotica stories to me). Any ideas?

 

[old_prof]

Not sure if you’re a Mac person but the upgrade to pages this fall really improved the tts capabilities. You have to copy text into pages but you get 90% towards a human reading

 

[SyleusSnow]

I been using Balabolka. It only has two voices, man/woman. But you can adjust tone of voice and talking speed. It's one hundred percent free, I believe it's open source as people call it. Like VLC player or LibreOffice, so no annoying adds in the software. It's extremely basic and straightforward, and lacks probably tons of other features a speech to text paid software would offer. But I'm all about the 'free' and 'no sign ups' stuff, so I choose to use it over anything that's not free.

Only draw back is sometimes it will read words wrong in rare situations, for example, the word I have in BOLD might be spoked as 'Red' instead of 'Reed'. There's probably a way to fix that though, but since I just use it to help with proof reading my stuff, it doesn't matter.

[EDIT] also no word count limit as far as I know. I paste chapters upward of 10k words into it with no problem.

Yep. Balabolka has been my go-to reader for years, long before Word had text to speech. Don't let the antiquated web site and the application UI fool you: it's amazing software. Sadly, Windows only.

It runs entirely on your computer - no "cloud" service required (and it's lightweight. I've run it on truly ancient computers). There is no word limit: feed it an epub of War and Peace you want. It opens most file formats: MS Word, epub, PDF... It also lets you edit Word docs and save the changes as you go. Oh, and you also can save anything to an mp3. I've used it to convert ebooks to audio when no narrated version exists.

Out of the box, it uses the robotic voices Windows has always had. On windows 11 though you can install a tweak to make natural voices available to it (search on the web page for "NaturalVoiceSAPIAdapter"). That same tweak also adds natural voices to other programs... notably Calibre's built-in text to speech. Some of those voices are "cloud" based, but not all.

Pretty good for a free app.

 

[SugarStorm]

I've been looking for an AI reader that can read stories in a natural sounding voice.

Safari on iOS has a good TTS hidden in Accessibility settings.

Settings > Accessibility > Read & Speak

As long as the voice is one of the Siri ones, you'll be able to enjoy a naturally sounding speech, and with the ability to manually configure Speaking Rate and Pitch.

YMMV but perhaps worth a try if you're in the Apple ecosystem.