Best Text-to-Speech with Voices?

January 6, 2017 6:10 AM

My daughter wants to write dialog for her animations and record it with text-to-speech. What's the best software, ideally with lots of different voices, ideally free?

She has access to both Mac and Windows 10, but I'm looking at Muvizu, which runs on Windows 10.

GoAnimate had a nice set of voices, but they went to a pricey business model, and I hear they've pruned their voice set.

posted by musofire to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Not sure if you're okay with creating the text to speech outside the animation software, but there a piece of software called Balabolka, that will output audio files. Balabolka is compatible with most voices you can install on Windows.

On the Mac you can enable a context menu to generate text to speech audio files. Macs have a bunch of built in voices.
posted by gregr at 9:56 AM on January 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

The built-in voices on mac are really easy to access from textedit or notepad or whatever it's called...just highlight it and it'sin the menu ssomewhere...sorry to not be more specific, I'm on my phone...there's about a dozen or so voices.
posted by sexyrobot at 1:14 PM on January 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

You might find this previous AskMe useful: Best (Free, Maybe?) Software for Computer-ish Voice?
posted by rangefinder 1.4 at 7:13 PM on January 6, 2017

Response by poster: After about 1.5 hours investigation into this, it seems pretty easy to record TTS on Mac for normal voices. I am having much more trouble finding a way to (a) record, not play (b) cartoon voices on (c) Windows. Lots of ways to hear speech, but I'd have to run a separate program to record the speech. There also seem to be some full animation packages that have text-to-speech, but they're fairly sophisticated for a kid to use.

Is there no program that allows you to type in text and export an mp3 or .wav file in a cartoon voice?
posted by musofire at 9:47 AM on January 7, 2017