Ask HN: Best free software to read text aloud What is the best software to read arbitrary text aloud in a decently human sounding voice? I'd be happy with a CLI tool or a website I can just paste text into. There are many articles I'd rather hear than read so I can rest my eyes. I've tried the builtin macOS say cmd, naturalreaders (dot) com and they both suck. |
- for software : balabolka (free, portable, customizable, tons of functions). Also DSpeech. But then you need to find the voices depending on the languages you need (some are free and/or already part of windows)
- chrome based browsers can do it through javascript and many voices are available (example from [1]) :
function speak(text) { var msg = new SpeechSynthesisUtterance(); var voices = speechSynthesis.getVoices(); msg.voice = voices[10]; msg.voiceURI = 'native'; msg.volume = 1; msg.rate = 1; msg.pitch = 2; msg.text = text; msg.lang = 'en-US';
speechSynthesis.speak(msg);speak('Short text');
speak('Collaboratively administrate empowered markets via plug-and-play networks. Dynamically procrastinate B2C users after installed base benefits. Dramatically visualize customer directed convergence without revolutionary ROI. Efficiently unleash cross-media information without cross-media value. Quickly maximize timely deliverables for real-time schemas. Dramatically maintain clicks-and-mortar solutions without functional solutions.');
speak('Another short text');
Then you can make a "Bookmarklets" to read aloud whatever you selected, for example.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21947730/chrome-speech-s...
This days I use my custom scripts that use eSpeak under the hood.
This implementation uses the built in API in your browser and will still work if you just save the page to your desktop as an HTML file.
say hello world
https://hn.cns.wtf/#32380045 - Also I have HN reader with comment reading feature, it's not so polished though (no settings, no announcement between comments)
If you want to turn just about any text into a playlist with a voice that actually sounds like a human is speaking, there's no better app than Matter. I use the iOS app with a Safari extension.