Text-to-Speech, audiobooks and 'found time'

3DStudent

The Living Force
FOTCM Member
This seemed different enough to be split off into its own thread, versus being in the speedreading thread. But basically it's to use 'found time' as JBP has called it, in order to consume more content, in this case in audio format. I searched the forum for text-to-speech and got some old results that didn't seem relevant.

Basically, I want to convert some of the longer SOTT articles into audio files that I can listen to either during my commute, or during breakfast and dinner and cleanup thereafter. I get about an hour during breakfast and dinner that I can devote to a podcast or article.

The most popular free TTS software seems to be one called Balabolka: Balabolka . I ran their zip files through virustotal and the portable one came up with 1/70 for detections, so I'm thinking that's a false positive? Anyone have any experience with this software?

Another old one that is discontinued is called Speakonia: Download Speakonia 1.0.3.6 . You have to register it to export to audio, but CNET has given the key because it's discontinued (I don't like downloading from CNET because of bloatware):
Name:Unlimited License
E-Mail:none@needed.com
Registration Code:SPK-174101-172083

There were two other apps, but they had three and one positive hits on virustotal so I have excluded them. :scared: These are the free ones, so I'm sure there are paid options that are better. These apps just use the default Microsoft voices on your PC. Any thoughts or experiences appreciated. Thanks.
 
This is more side note/humour/entertainment, but hear me out:

Maybe we can read various articles in our gorgeous radio voices and post them to an online repository and use some type of voting system to gauge who the best narrator is, or who narrated a specific article the best.

The thought started as a bit of a chuckle but resulted in my being astounded by the community building implications. FWIW
 
Well, I don't know if that's what you're looking for, but a couple of months ago I did an experiment just to make the most of my time. The result was this little app for Android, which basically reads the selected articles. At the moment it works only in English, German, French, and Spanish.

The app is in alpha yet because I haven't had much time to dedicate to it, but at least for my personal use it is useful.
I leave the link here in case anyone is interested in trying it (you will have to activate from the Android configuration "allow installing apps from unknown sources").

http://msante.vianetcon.com.ar/android/sott-reader.apk
 
The most popular free TTS software seems to be one called Balabolka: Balabolka . I ran their zip files through virustotal and the portable one came up with 1/70 for detections, so I'm thinking that's a false positive? Anyone have any experience with this software?

It might be. I downloaded it and installed it without any issue. I like it because it's really flexible and quite useful for creating sound files when I need to make large vocab lists when doing language study as it gives you the option to export each line as a separate mp3 sound file. I haven't yet tried it for just reading out articles but it should do it no problem.

One thing I don't like are the built-in MS voices. They sound terrible and too roboticky. What I did was download more professional TTS voices which sounded a lot more natural. This site has a few in several languages and while not exactly cheap they do offer a free 30-day trial so you can try them out.
 
I installed Balabolka and I find it useful. I converted MI and luc's articles on Darwinism/ID. I don't mind Microsoft David's voice, and you get used to the intonation after a while. I'll probably make this a habit and 'podcastify' larger articles to listen to. Maybe even check out some different voices to buy and install.
 
For the mac users, macOS itself comes with a built-in TTS and you can use it anywhere on your computer from the Notes app to any browser.


To get started, highlight or select the text which you want to be read and then right click, go to Speech and then to Start Speaking; and your Mac should start reading the text to you. It also supports a lot of other languages other than English and there are a lot of voices to choose from in all the languages. To change the language option simply go to Accessibility > Speech. Although some voices are very robotic, there are a few which aren’t and sound more like a human.


But the TTS is far from perfect; it is very basic and barebones and lacks options like pause/play, picking up from a selected word instantly and a lot more.

Quick Tip: It blew my mind and might even blow yours to know that the native TTS on Mac also supports converting your text into audio files. Just select the required text, right click and go to Services > Add to iTunes as a spoken track. The text will be converted to an audio track and added to your iTunes library.

There are a bunch of apps too, which I have not tried, here's a link to am article talking about various apps if anyone is so inclined.
 
@3DStudent
This is a good thought, and one I've had myself. I went through and converted a lot of the transcripts and articles into epub files for kindles, and that worked out quite well for me whilst I had time to sit on the bus. Not so much anymore with now been able to just walk to work.

I've had a quick search at self hosted solutions and found the below program.


I should get time to install it over the weekend to take a look, but if there are any other code savy users then this might be a good start.

@msante Thanks for sharing that! I'll take a look at it as well :)
 
Same here, there is far too much stuff on my TO READ list to be able to read it all physically with that software development day job. Especially harder, now that I've also taken up gardening for personal/family food production and preservation.

Therefore, what I did was to purchase TextAloud along with IVONA Voices. They work like a charm, especially great while I drive.

It would be great i.e. if I had the time, I would set up things on a rented virtual machine so anyone in need would just upload things they want read out loud in mp3 format and have the output within minutes as a free service at some web panel. Same goes for any useful software that needn't reside on one's computer. Not sure if this is ok, though, so if mods deem it inappropriate, remove my comment.
 
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