There are many situations where the user may wish (or requires) the computer to read for them.

Below are various programs that I've found available to do this. I'm trying to include mostly the ones that are free in this listing. Most are based on the Microsoft Speech API, other on the Lernout & Hauspie engines.

If you know of others that should be listed, please let us know at the Contact Us page.

Note: Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred and Professional versions have text-to-speech.

Link: Nextup TextAloud Page (opens in new page)

Description:

TextAloud converts any text into spoken words. Instead of the valuable time you spend reading on your computer, imagine being free to relax, get up and stretch, or work on other things while the information you need is read to you in a pleasant, natural sounding human voice. Better still, leave your computer behind.

TextAloud's unique Text to MP3 conversion can save your daily reading to MP3 audio files to download to your portable MP3 player. Listen to email, online news, or important documents while you exercise, work or commute.

Download TextAloud now and start getting more out of your time.

The base price for this product is 29.95USD

Note:
Trial Downloads:
Standard Voices (Exe)
With AT&T Natural Voices(Exe)

Site: Microsoft Speech Home

Link: http://www.microsoft.com/speech (opens in new page)

Description:

A place for all that is speech and Microsoft. You can learn about all of the Microsoft technologies here. They also have a download area, but it seems mostly Speech Server oriented at this time.

Site: Speakonia

Link: http://www.cfs-technologies.com/home/?id=1.4 (opens in new page)

Description:

CFS-Technologies Speakonia is a FREE Text-To-Speech (TTS) GUI (graphical User-Interface) Program which uses the Microsoft ® Speech Technology.

The easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI) is similar to Notepad. Speakonia reads aloud any given text with just one mouse click!
The reading can be paused, resumed and can be exported to a wave file. In addition Speakonia is able to fetch web pages through an internal HTTP interface and read them aloud for you. You can even have your mails read to you using the "Clipboard Reading" feature.

Site: Sayz Me

Link: http://www.datafurnace.net.au/sayzme/ (opens in new page)

Description:

Sayz Me is a very simple text to speech reader. Copy text from web pages, emails or documents and this free utility will read the words out aloud to you. Sayz Me uses the Microsoft speech engine and synthetic voices. Listen to text and give your eyes a rest. Great accessibility software as you can adjust the font size and color to assist reading. Very simple and easy to use. Best of all its free. You can download Sayz Me from Source Forge.

Features include:

- Speaks the clipboard contents - Speaks text from files

- Speaks user entered text - Select speakers voice

- Adjustable pitch, speed and volume - Highlighting of currently spoken words

- Select font, font size and color - Double click to jump to a particular word.

Site: Jaws for DOS

Link: http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_downloads/jdos... (downloads the file)
Download text is at: http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_downloads/JAWS...

Description:

Jaws is a very popular screen reader for IBM machines. This version is only for MS-DOS (remember that one?) They have more downloads at http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_downloads/more... including instructions for downloading Jaws for DOS

Jaws is also available for Windows at their website: http://www.freedomscientific.com/.

Site: SayPad -- Inspired Code's Resources for the Visually Impaired

Link: http://inspiredcode.net/4VisImp.htm (opens in new page)

Description:

SayPad is a freeware talking text editor that can read you a good book or help you write one, using the latest speech technology. It carefully installs the SAPI 5.1 Text To Speech engine from a compact 8.2 megabyte download. This is a quick and painless way to get the SAPI5 TTS onto your system, plus it does cool things like read to you with natural phrasing as a person would. You can fit huge files into it like the whole Bible for instance, which you can prove by downloading it below. (In fact it has a filter you can turn on that skips over verse numbers to let you hear it like a story.) SayPad can now convert Text to MP3, even a whole book in one run, splitting off chapters into separate, well named MP3 files you can burn onto a CD.

Note: There is a smaller install near the bottom of the page for those having SAPI 5.1 on their machine.