How can you listen
to written words?

Now I know I spend more time driving than sitting and reading. I also knew deep down that somebody must have cracked the code as to how to turn written words into speech without that computer voice.   Well I took the plunge and started searching and there are a lot of programs out there which do just this and it’s fascinating how it all works.   There were a lot of notes and documents I needed to “read” and that drove me to keep on looking to find a decent program.   I then had to find voices which worked for me. The best programs give you choices for which type of voices you want to hear male, female, American, English, Spanish, French, Arabic there are a lot of options out there.   But I have not tried to translate from different languages.

Something like Hal in 2001 "I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal"   "I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission"   "And I want to help you " If you can remember that far back

As you can see English is my mother tongue and I have got used to the American accent as most of my motivational tapes are from America but the English voices are still high quality.

One thing they are not human sounding as you would like but after a short while you really get use to them. Especially if it’s the content you want to hear.

The practical issues are check what you are working with and look out for page numbers which if you do not delete numbers just get repeated and you wonder what they mean. However I found out a more important thing to look out for and that is lines and dashes.

I spent ten minutes listening to the word underscore which was a series of lines on a page which I had not deleted. Believe me you do not repeat this again, so when you do copy word to voice look out for any lists or lines and delete them before processing them.

Another thing is to always label your copies so when you play them back on your mp3 player you can see what you have.

If you are like me you will collect a lot of recordings and having a good title helps you find what you want so much easier.

One good program Natural Reader works well and for anyone who has dyslexia or needs an automatic proof reader have a look and see if it works for you

And Siri can spell

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

For you