Does anyone know an good free natural sounding text reader for the mac?

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116

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+2 Q:

Does anyone know an good free natural sounding text reader for the mac?

+6 A:

Does it not have one built in? I suspect it's as natural sounding as you'd get for free.

tpower 2009-03-01 10:54:08

"Alex" in Leopard is pretty good.

Matthew Schinckel 2009-03-01 11:40:56

+2 A:

Have you tried changing the voices on the Speech application (in System Preferences?)

Fortyrunner 2009-03-01 10:54:20

No. I think you don't understand the difference between "Natural Voices" and "Microsoft-like Voices". It's huge.

Thanks 2009-03-01 10:58:16

About as much as the difference between 'free' and 'paying some money'

Gareth 2009-03-01 11:39:58

+4 A:

OS X has built-in speech services for any Cocoa app. Just select the text and click AppName->Services->Speech->Start Speaking Text

Additionally, Preview can read PDFs quite nicely. Just open the PDF and select Edit->Speech->Start Speaking.

The default Alex voice (in Leopard at least) is quite good.

Paul Lefebvre 2009-03-01 17:00:44

+1 A:

A couple of the built-in voices sound much better than the others. In particular, one of the new voices, "Alex", I believe, sounds much more natural than the others.

Mike Heinz 2009-03-03 17:57:29

ansaurus

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Does anyone know an good free natural sounding text reader for the mac?

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