Photo of the Text to Speech Software free download Text to Speech Software converts text documents content into spoken word. With Text to Voice tool your PC gets a reading system or a TTS Reader that can read out every text, as you like. Just listen and let your computer read Word documents, pdf files or epub documents for you. Free Text to Speech Natural Voices - SAPI 4 & SAPI 5. 2nd Speech Center supports all the Microsoft SAPI4, SAPI5 (Speech Application Programming Interface) compatible text-to-speech voices! Ace Buddy supports all the SAPI4 voices. We have collected most of high-quality free or commercial voices from the Internet for you.
I am using windows 10 and want to get more voices for Microsoft at the moment I only have two options: microsoft Hazel and microsoft Zira. Does anyone know how I can get more options?
2 Answers
Does anyone know how I can get more voices?
You can download some more voices from many free TTS voices (which may not be so good). One of the sources for downloading free Microsoft and LTS TTS voices is Zero2000. You can also purchase very high quality TTS voices for Windows from companies like Ivona, Cepstral or CereProc.
Source Choose Text-to-Speech Voice in Windows 10
Narrator for Windows (all versions) has a few built-in options for male and female voices.
To set Narrator voice options (Microsoft)
Here is a good source for more voices:
Best Free Windows Narrator Voices You Can Use (Zero2000.com)
Excerpt:
In the world of today, more and more people use the text to speech computer technology to free their eyes and save time. As a vital component of the text to speech technology, voices, i.e. speech engines, are the core of text to speech software. Because text to speech software need to invoke voices to synthetic speech and output spoken audio.
There are many voices available on the Internet today, such as AT&T Natural Voices, Cepstral voices, IVONA voices, CereProc voices, NeoSpeech voices, etc.. But most of these voices are commercial and the prices are even higher than the prices of normal text-to-speech software. For example, the prices of AT&T Natural Voices are $35 (base required) plus $35 per additional voice, and the prices of Cepstral voices are &29.99 per voice.
Fortunately, there are also enough high-quality free voices we can use. Most of them are compatible with the Microsoft SAPI 4 or SAPI 5. Generally, the higher SAPI version, the better quality.
Here is the free voices list sorted by the recommended degree.
Microsoft Mike, Mary and Sam -
Microsoft Sam is the default English male voice shipped with Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Though not the default, Microsoft Sam is also available in Windows Vista Home Premium. It is used by Narrator, the screen reader program built into the operating system.
Microsoft Mike and Microsoft Mary are optional male and female voices respectively with better quality, available for download from the Microsoft website or other third party text-to-speech related websites.
The most noticeable feature of these three voices is there are both SAPI 4 and SAPI 5 versions of them. SAPI 5 voices are only available on Windows 2000 and later Windows NT-based operating systems. As an exception, the SAPI 5 versions of these voices cannot be installed on Windows Vista and Windows 7. The SAPI 4 versions are more compatible. They can be installed and used on Windows 98 and all the later Windows operating systems.
Microsoft Anna -
Microsoft Anna is the default English voice shipped with Windows Vista and Windows 7. Microsoft Anna is a SAPI 5-only voice and is designed to sound more natural than the previous system default voice Microsoft Sam.
This excellent female voice is base on the new Microsoft SAPI 5.3/5.4. So you cannot use it on Windows XP directly and also there is no standalone installer of this voice on the Microsoft website. The only way to use this fantastic voice on Windows XP is by the Microsoft Streets & Trips. The Microsoft Streets & Trips 2006 and later versions install the voice and the new Microsoft SAPI onto Windows XP computers for the voice-prompt direction feature.
Some third party text-to-speech related websites supply smaller repacked Microsoft Anna installers for Windows XP users. However, it's incomplete and not working correctly on Windows XP because the SAPI version of Windows XP is 5.1.
Lernout & Hauspie Voices -
Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products, or L&H, was a leading Belgium-based speech recognition technology company. This company released dozens of high-quality SAPI 4 voices across multiple languages, including ten American English voices and two British English voices.
In addition, Lernout & Hauspie Michael and Michelle are also optional male and female voices licensed by Microsoft from Lernout & Hauspie, and available through Microsoft Office XP and Microsoft Office 2003 or Microsoft Reader.
Most of the above voices can be found on the Microsoft's website or downloaded directly from the 2nd Speech Center web site. Click here to download them immediately.
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I tried several text-to-speak programs (on linux) such as Fetival
, eSpeak
, etc; but the voice in all of them is very robotic. There are voice templates to change voice from male to female, but the problem in them all is that the system read each word separately, instead of starting to read a sentence.
Is there any advanced program or trick to read a text with a relatively natural voice?
The current artificial voices cannot be listened for a long text (too boring as the listener cannot concentrate).
closed as off-topic by Mokubai♦Mar 1 '16 at 18:32
This question appears to be off-topic. The users who voted to close gave this specific reason:
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6 Answers
I think you mean Text-To-Speech (TTS) since you are talking about a robotic voice. TTS engines take written text and voice it back, whereas speech recognition engines understand human speech and convert it into a machine readable format. Loquendo has the most natural sounding TTS engine I have heard. They have a version for Linux. They have an interactive demo you can play with to hear how great it sounds. There TTS engine can take special characters in the text to do things like provide emphasis on phrases or even make the voice laugh or cry. Not many TTS engines do this.
After weeks of researching the same question I found the voices from Ivona (here) and Loquendo (here and here) to be the best TTS voices available for Windows. Only Ivona lists prices on their website though. To actually use the TTS voices on your Windows PC I recommend Balabolka (free), Ivona MiniReader (free) or Ivona Reader.
Next check out Clearly from Evernote. It is a browser extension currently only available for Google Chrome. It provides TTS for premium customers only. The (iSpeech powered) TTS voice is not as good as Ivona's or Loquendo's but it gives you a nice reader view on blog posts/articles by stripping away distracting page elements. You can also set it to auto-highlight the currently read word!
Check out ReadSpeaker too which can be implemented by website owners into their site. Readspeaker provides auto-highlighting of the currently read paragraph/word, auto-scrolling and the ability to change the TTS speed.
[Edit:] There are some free useful Google Chrome extensions that are powered by iSpeech as well.
You can buy a ready made device . http://www.textspeak.com makes human sounding text to speech products, boards and boxes. They have 20 languages and simple are the best sounding TTS you can find.
There is no license or development...just buy the box if you only need one voice output.
(This is NOT a SW solution, but we used it in a paging systems... 5 minutes to install)
From their site
'TextSpeak Embedded Text-To-Speech modules series convert ASCII text to a natural, clear voice with unlimited vocabulary. The small footprint, plug-in solution accepts wide range of input data to generate real-time speech for Security Transit Medical and Industry.
I don't know if it's open source, but Google's TTS is free, and is very natural sounding in comparison to Samsung's and Microsoft Anna.
Cepstral seems to provide reasonable prices for text to speech voices. You might want to check them out as an option.
When it comes to having a good sound, what you really want to look for is not the text to speech software, but the good voices: they are a separate subject.
The same voice will work accross different software. The best one I know of at the moment is named Audrey. A female voice with a british accent. Although I have to change most ' that are on the text with copy-past to one from the keyboard, it is worth it for an almost realistic sounding voice. I also have to place a pausing symbol (.,: or such) at the end of titles so she doesn't keep talking right through them. I still think it's the best voice I have so far. But I wouldn't mind finding the one from that weather channel that was mentioned ealier:
'NOAA weather radio broadcasts are EXCELLENT. I would not object to listening to that program read a long text.– Jeanne Pindar'
Here is a website which has sample voices on it: including Audrey. I have others, but I have only used her for a long time now.
PS: you have to pay for the better voices, but they will work on free text-to-speech software afterwards... at least the one I have. (Free Natural Reader)
Voice Sample web page:http://www.digitalfuturesoft.com/attnaturalvoices.php