[yarafie]

Does anyone know of software that can read out loud an ebook?

[yarafie]

Does anyone know of software that can read out loud an ebook?

[Robb Bates]

Fonix Voice Central, I think...

Robb

[Steve Jordan]

PC versions of Adobe Reader can read PDF text aloud, although it could use some work on voice clarity (diction is pretty flat). I do not believe handheld or smartphone PDF readers can yet read text aloud.

[Robb Bates]

I've found two more that do fairly well. You have to cut and paste your text into their text box. I had to use the Ctrl-C and CTRL-V on the PPC keyboard.

Flite and SmartRead Mobile

Neither is high quality and both have their bugs and limitations, but they both work on my WM5 PPC-6700.

Flite is free. Smart Read Mobile is a ridiculous $35.

Robb

[kevroses]

Hi, I realize I'm joining this conversation late, but I wonder if there are voice readers for ebooks that are natural and fluid enough to replace the human voice. I'm thinking specifically about the possibilities of setting up a program so it could read to the blind. Does anyone know if this is possible yet? If not, how far away do you think we are from that point?

[uwaku]

Well, MS Office has built-in voices for reading documents, but they're not very close to the diction of actual human voices. Are we close? not really. In other languages it's much easier, because intonation is word-based, rather than context-based as in English. Our system voices can pronounce the words correctly, but doing so for each word without intonation based on the actual sentence and story sounds... well, like a computer.

In the meantime, what's wrong with audiobooks? I have over 200 books on tape and over 300 in MP3 format. Most libraries have dozens, if not hundreds.

[Steve Jordan]

I guess there's nothing wrong with an audiobook, as long as the book you want to read has been recorded as an audiobook. I, for one, would love to see an easy way to convert my e-books to audiobooks, only because the prospect of single-handedly recording my books is a bit daunting to me. People do say I have a great speaking voice, but I'm not sure I'm ready to put that to the test yet...