text-to-speech

Text-to-speech software is useful, but most of the stuff you actually want to convert isn’t sitting neatly inside a text box. It’s in PDFs, presentations, web pages, images and documents. AnyToSpeech solves that problem easily — it’s designed to turn all those formats into natural-sounding audio.

It quickly turns text, PDFs, documents, images and URLs into audio, and can even clone your voice, transcribe media and create two-speaker podcasts. And right now, you can secure lifetime access to AnyToSpeech’s Hobby Plan for just $39.99 (MSRP $249). 

You can have your iPhone read out loud any text on its screen with a useful accessibility feature called Accessibility Reader. Apple designed this feature for people who have trouble reading small text, but you will find it handy even if you don’t — in lots of situations.

For instance, your iPhone can read recipes aloud while your hands are busy cooking. Or you can quickly hear how to pronounce a word you don’t know — that’s what I use Accessibility Reader for most often. You can even hear what you’re typing as you write.

The potential applications for everyday use are incredibly broad. Here’s how to use Accessibility Reader and all of the iPhone’s Read & Speak features. 

In iOS 17, the iPhone got a built-in text-to-speech feature called Live Speech. You can even use Live Speech with a digital version of your own voice called Personal Voice.

Apple devised Personal Voice for users “at risk of losing their ability to speak — such as those with a recent diagnosis of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) or other conditions that can progressively impact speaking ability.” It was the subject of a touching and heartfelt video Apple made called “The Lost Voice.”

Here’s how to set up and use Live Speech.

A few years ago, it was shocking when a computer-generated voice didn’t sound like an underwater answering machine. These days, social media like TikTok practically runs on synthesized voices.

Now you can generate your own lifelike voices for books, school and a ton of other functions. The TexTalky AI text-to-speech app is a lifelike speech generator with 128-plus languages. And you might be speechless to learn that you can get a lifetime subscription at the heavily discounted price of $37 (regularly $540).

Text-to-voice software doesn’t have to sound like a robot reading a script. Text-to-speech app TexTalky uses artificial intelligence to produce amazing results. And right now, a lifetime subscription to TexTalky is on sale for $37 (regularly $540).

If you’re like us, you’re probably already looking forward to next year and how it could be better — in more ways than one. If you’re interested in learning a new language or earning a new certification to beef up your resume, look no further than this roundup of skill-building apps and software.

With Cyber Monday pricing, you can get them for an extra 40% off with code CMSAVE40 for a limited time.

Reading is essential to daily life and staying informed, but so is listening. In an age of podcasts, audiobooks and multitasking, many of us have adjusted to take in information through our ears while our eyes are busy doing other things.

Plus, some people simply retain information better through listening rather than reading. That was the case with Cliff Weitzman, who struggled with learning because of dyslexia. So he built a simple but powerful tool that makes any text instantly listenable.

I find myself using the text to speech function on Mac OS X far too much. Having my Mac read articles and emails out loud to me allows me to multitask and do other things — like edit awesome videos for Cult of Mac — without ignoring important messages.

But did you know you can even save those text to speech recording for listening at a later time?

In this week’s Quick Tips video, I’m going to show you how to turn text into a spoken track and save it into iTunes, allowing you to find save your favourite articles and listen to on your iPhone.

Famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has a better way to talk now, thanks to a new custom predictive text software upgrade from SwiftKey and Intel Labs. The technology that Professor Hawking was currently using was going on 20 years old, and needed a fix to help him communicate and work faster and more efficiently.

His life-long motor neurone disease of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) has necessitated his use of communications technology, and this new system will allow him to choose words rather than individual letters, which lets him type less than 20 percent of all needed characters in his messages. It also makes him 10 times more efficient with other computing tasks like browsing the web, working with files, and switching between tasks on the computer.

Ever wanted to hear Siri declaim “Luke, I am your father” in 32 different languages?

In a blog post by the developers behind the daily Spanish word app Vocab Ninja, you can click on all of Siri’s different voices — overwhelmingly female-gendered, interestingly enough — in both standard and enhanced audio resolutions.

Text-to-speech is great. But have you ever wished that it could be a little more creepy? As in, child’s-voice-coming-out-of-your-computer creepy? Well, you’re in luck. Thanks to a service designed to help kids to communicate, you too can make your iPad talk in the voice of a little girl or boy. Shiver.

I’ve been driving a lot lately, and have been wanting to listen to ebooks on my iPHone as I do so. It’s fairly simple to turn on VoiceOver and have what sounds like Siri read my books to me, but honestly? She’s a terrible narrator. The VoiceOver voice is heavily robotic, and it’s difficult to understand what’s being read to me most of the time, so I end up giving up or contemplating purchasing an audiobook from iTunes.

But I’d really like to just continue the ebooks I already have on my iPhone while I’m driving. That way I can listen to them while in the car, but actually read them when I’m not. NaturalReader just might be part of the solution I’ve been looking for, so I figured I’d share it here with you.

OS X has really good text to speech functionality for users with a visual or other learning disability, but it’s something that I think we all would benefit from at certain times. How about listening to a webpage when you’re folding clothes, or having your Mac your Twitter stream out loud while you do some sort of two-handed crafting project, like knitting?

Turns out, you can make this happen super easily with OS X Mountain Lion, invoking a keystroke to read highlighted text anywhere on your computer. Want to have your Mac read that Word doc your boss just sent over? This little tip will make it happen.

It’s the future, already, right? While we may not have flying cars or jetpacks, we do have computers ad mobile devices that we can speak to and that can speak to us.

Here are a few ways to make your Mac speak to you in a variety of ways. Make it read books to you right from the Kindle app, change text documents into audio files for easy transport, and even let you know when your Terminal session is finished. If that isn’t enough, we’ll even show you how to get better voices to do all this with, even in different languages. So settle in and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Mention having a computer read a book to them, and most people will give you that look. You know that look, the one that says, “I hate those goofy robot voices. I want a real person to read to me.”

While there’s no current way to make a computer voice sound like an actual human voice, many of the built in voices are much better these days. In addition, there are some high quality voices you may not even know you have built right into OS X Lion. Here’s how to enable them for use.

Lots of us like to listen to audiobooks, and lots of us buy ebooks across a variety of services and devices. If you own an iPad, for instance, you might download audio books from iTunes or iBooks from that particular app, and then read right on your iPad. If you want to listen to iBooks, or have a visual impairment that makes it tough to see the text on the iPad screen, you can turn on VoiceOver and have the iBook read to you.

What about the Mac, you might ask? Can’t you just turn on VoiceOver on the Mac and have it read ebooks to you? Not if you use an e-Reader software like Kindle or Nook, you can’t. There is a way to get your Mac to read Kindle books to you, out loud, with its built-in text to speech software, but it’s not as intuitive as you might think. Here’s how.

Terminal has tons of great applications on the Mac. By accessing the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X, Terminal allows power users and newbies alike to do things with their Mac that may not be enabled out of the box.

Code monkeys and script jockeys frequently use Terminal to run longer processes than typical, like compiling code (the process of making all those little lines of code into an app that will run on your Mac) or running scripts. When they finish, they finish. There’s no built in way to know that they’re done.

Sure would be great to listen to every day documents easily, say, on a long drive or airplane commute. There are a ton of ways to make this happen, including some third party apps, but this is a pretty slick, easy way to turn any text you can highlight into spoken text that can be put on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod, ready to go along with you.

In my day job, I work with folks with disabilities. Some of them have lost the ability to speak through an accident or stroke, and come to us looking for technology and devices to help them reclaim their ability to communicate with others. One of the apps I find myself frequently recommending is today’s tip.

A number of major carriers all over the globe have begun receiving a near-final build of Apple’s upcoming iOS 5 software for testing, according to one report. The software is said to be a newer than the beta recently seeded to developers, and includes a number of features that we’re still yet to see in previous betas, including that much-rumored speech-to-text technology.

We have theorized before that Apple was holding back its much rumored iOS 5’s Nuance speech integration as a feature to be revealed at the iPhone 5 launch event, and it looks like we may have been right, as a couple of new screenshots have popped up showing just how speech recognition will be integrated with the operating syste,.

We’ve been speculating on Apple’s partnership with Nuance for some weeks now, and confirmation the two companies are working together comes with the new speech technology discovered in the Mac OS X Lion beta. Now you can hear those new voices for yourself.

The convention of rumor has it that the next major version of iOS 5 will boast some truly spiffy, industry-changing voice recognition and text-to-speech capabilities, courtesy of a broad partnership with Nuance… and if those rumors are true, than this could just be what it will look like.