Long ago, I used to have a software to convert text to audio. Its name was ReadAloud and it was open source.
I don’t know if anyone has tried this software (that still exists by the way), but it used to be quite painful to listen to the robot voice reading the text. You could barely listen to the voice more than 2 minutes, and you had to be extremely concentrated to be able to understand what was read.
Last week, while wondering if there had been any advance in that kind of software, I did some research, and I came across a lot of titles that pretend to read text. I did download all those I could find on the first two pages of google, and I can say that there has been a lot of advance in the text reading voices software field.
Now, instead of the robotic voice, the software titles come with many natural sounding voice options. The reading can be boring if the material we listen to is very long, but for a short kid story book or for classical children audio books, the result could be acceptable.
Below, I am including the link for one particular software that caught my attention because of the many options it has. For instance:
It can convert any text including pdf and web pages to an audio format (mp3)
It has many voice options, including american english, british english, french, spanish and german among other languages
One of the optional versions (the educational one) comes with 1000 free ebooks
One of the optional versions (the educational one) allows the creation of audio books with background music, echo, etc. which is great
Source:http://www.childrens-audiobooks.net/2010/05/31/a-great-software-that-can-generate-loads-of-kids-audio-books-instantly/
