Converting text to speech is often useful & apps that perform this function smoothly are very much in demand these days.
Areas where such a conversion tool is particularly helpful include creating podcasts, & naturally creating audio from text for sight challenged individuals. There are some well-known apps in the market such as Amazon Web Service’s Polly, but we’d like to take a look at some of the latest “players” on the block. So here are some new text to speech apps:
Available for Microsoft Windows PCs & mobile devices, Any Text to Voice is a feature rich text converter. Text to convert may be loaded from a docx, doc, rtf, txt, pdf, epub, mobi file or pasted into a textbox & read back in a variety of voices, which can be selected from various supported languages & dialect accents. The app supports “bookmarking” for the sentence or word last read, & allows the user to choose the speed of playback. Additionally, audio files can be downloaded once converted.
A new iOS app which specifically caters to users who want to scan in or copy & paste text to convert to audio. The app features a simple, easy to understand interface that is function specific, but it includes options to select playback speed & the accent of the reader’s voice. A cool addition if the image to voice conversion, which will read the text from any uploaded image.
An Online text to speech app that converts any Website into an audio file, which users can download for further use. This type of app is particularly useful for turning articles or blog posts into podcasts, but it could also be useful for developing e-learning courses or turning text-based books into audio books. The Site allows 2 audio file conversions per month free of charge, but the low-cost Pro version allows unlimited conversions.
@Voice Aloud Reader (TTS Reader)
Android app, which supports files in TXT, PDF, DOC, DOCX, RTF, OpenOffice documents, EPUB, MOBI, PRC, AZW & FB2 e-books & more. It’s an HTML reader, document reader & ebook reader all in one, both for reading on-screen, or listening offline. Also available as a desktop/laptop Google Chrome browser extension, the app is super versatile & supports most functions usually found in much more expensive software.
Image by Serena Wong from Pixabay
