What's the best (free) text-to-speech option available?

July 29, 2009 4:38 PM

What is the absolute best text-to-speech (TTS) option? Oh yeah, must be free...

I'm in the process of proofing some documents I've written and I think having good TTS software (or a web app) would be invaluable. However money's tight, so I'm looking for free options at this point.

So far the best free option I've found is YAKiToMe, but it leaves something to be desired. The samples at the NaturalSoft website, particularly those from NeoSpeech and acapela sound incredible, but, alas, they are $30 a pop.

So are there any free options that come close to the quality of the paid options or is YAKiToMe the best I can do?

posted by jluce50 to technology (4 comments total)

If you have a Mac, TTS is built-in. I haven't tried YAKiToMe, so I can't tell you which is better.
posted by zippy at 4:48 PM on July 29

If you are on windows, you can download Opera and load up HTMl documents and Opera will read it to you. Opera uses IBM's speech technology, it's pretty good. I've used it for this purpose extensively, it's very helpful.
posted by bigmusic at 5:13 PM on July 29

Festival. It's an academic research project, so it's free as in beer and free as in Free/Open Source Software. The beta in particular produces excellent results, but there's a web demo on the above link so you can test drive it for yourself.

The beta is also multiplatform, and now runs on Windows, Linux and OSX (and, indeed, FreeBSD).
posted by jaduncan at 10:43 PM on July 29

Good options, thanks all.

@bigmusic: Wow, the Opera TTS is actually pretty decent. Thanks!
posted by jluce50 at 1:21 PM on July 30