free text to speech

free text to speech

The Benefits of Free Text to Speech

1. Introduction

Lately, I’ve been using TTS software as a proofreading tool. When you have been staring at a computer screen for too long, it’s easy to miss typos, wording, or grammatical errors. You may have developed the habit of reading softly to yourself and not really paying attention to the actual words that you are viewing. Subsequently, you could miss errors that need correcting. By having your work read to you by TTS software, you are more likely to catch mistakes. This also saves time because you won’t have to go back and reread the material to find and correct errors.

Free Text to Speech (TTS) software allows you to have text read aloud to you. This is a great tool for someone who is a visual learner and needs the information read to them. It is also a benefit for persons with visual impairments. TTS software can be downloaded to your computer and used with your word processing program. In addition, it can convert the text into an audio file which can be saved to a portable device such as a smartphone or MP3 player. TTS software is also available online through various websites.

2. Accessibility for All

Studies have shown that having access to speech synthesis technology has been beneficial to students with learning disabilities. The National Center for Accessible Information Technology in Education found that students who use text-to-speech software do not have to spend unbelievable amounts of time or energy on reading, leaving them with more time to do other academic pursuits. Students think of the reader as a friend who teaches them to decode text by sounding out the words. By doing this, they have more time to focus on comprehension, writing, and critical thinking. Text-to-speech software has been shown to help the older generation of disabled persons. By allowing the computer to read text out loud, the elders will be able to keep up with technology and information without having to learn to read the computer screen. This feature is also beneficial to those who are blind or vision impaired.

Many students with disabilities are unable to read traditional text, whether because of visual, cognitive, or physical disability. Text-to-speech technology can also be used to read aloud electronic text in other formats, such as Portable Document Format (PDF), hypertext markup language (HTML), and Flash. This can be done on a computer or on the go with a portable device. This accommodation would also benefit people with “hidden” disabilities such as dyslexia or mild cognitive impairments.

3. Enhancing Learning and Education

The SABLE markup language, developed with input from other TTS researchers and based on XML, is a high-level, text-to-speech specific language for building synthesis control structures. Our primary motivation in designing SABLE was to give researchers and developers finer control over the actions of a speech synthesizer than has been available with a general-purpose language. Building control structures in SABLE allows for hypotheses to be tested, and the effects of many synthesis parameters and modifications to be experienced, using speech synthesis, before changes are directly made to the database or source code. SABLE aims to be a language that is not only very expressive and powerful but also very simple and quick to use.

FreeTTS is an excellent tool for anyone interested in developing multilingual curriculum. At the University of California, Berkeley, we have developed an animated agent capable of speaking English, Spanish, and Tagalog with different accents. By integrating FreeTTS with our agent, we can automatically generate speech in any language. Also, with FreeTTS available as an open-source product, our work in making education more accessible for the disabled becomes more available for anyone interested in bringing it to their own communities.

Over the last few years, increasing numbers of students with disabilities have been placed in regular classroom settings, thus raising the bar for all students to achieve. With the increased focus on accountability for results, teachers are challenged to make curriculum accessible to all students.

4. Streamlining Productivity

When considering the advantages of TTS, many people might think of its direct benefits to education, learning, and literacy, but it is also extremely useful to people with disabilities. This is because TTS is incredibly versatile. For example, it can be an excellent proofreading tool. Reading out a document in a different voice enables the writer to pick up mistakes in their writing. This is especially useful for people with dyslexia, who may often write something, then re-read it and change what they have written so that it says something entirely different from the original and not realize, since they will not hear the error in their own mental reading voice. Dyslexic people are also likely to benefit from TTS in the form of audiobooks. TTS can also be useful to blind or partially sighted people. As previously mentioned, screen reading software can enable a blind person to operate a computer with ease, but TTS is also useful with applications such as Skype, where the TTS can read out the text of an instant message sent to the user. A study on the use of TTS in a corporate environment by K Minase, K Tamenishi, and M Sugimoto found that “The gate to information retrieval through aural means will greatly benefit the blind” and “Faster skimming via aural information processing was observed, and feedback by the visually impaired subjects indicated that they could reach deeper understanding.”

5. Empowering Content Creation

Hearing written text read aloud is a core function that benefits many users. We have such a user in mind when developing our software and we place great emphasis on the quality of the voice output. Text-to-speech has been an invaluable feature for the many people with reading and writing difficulties, as it allows the listener to more easily understand, process, and remember the text. Possible difficulties and disabilities include dyslexia, visual impairment, brain injury, attention deficit disorder (ADD), and others. Voice reading is an easy way to help such people interact with the written word. With a large amount of written content available, this is a growingly important feature. In fact, it has been said that text-to-speech is the most important assistive technology for people with cognitive disabilities. Text-to-speech software is also popular in the business world, where it is used to increase productivity and help with proofreading. A TTS system allows the user to simply take a break from staring at a computer screen by listening to the text being read instead. This can improve a person’s posture and reduce the risk of repetitive strain injury. For proofreading, TTS software is a great way to hear your writing read back with fresh ears, as hearing your work read aloud can highlight problem areas more effectively than silent reading. High-quality TTS software is becoming an alternative for human voice talent for audio production, as it enables cost and time efficiencies. The next generation of TTS systems is aimed at the synthesis of more dynamic speech (intonation, expression, emotions), and will greatly improve the sound and the delivery of the current flat and robotic generated speech. This will make TTS software more desirable for many users, as it will bring life to the reading of long documents by enabling the user to listen without losing focus.