AT&T Natural Voices Review

Voicing My Opinion

Submitted by evaluator on Mon, 2009-10-26 20:51.
Author's Product Rating:
Ease of Use: 
Sound Quality: 
Effectiveness: 
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The lowest price: 29$
You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
Pros:
It reads for you when you don't feel like reading, or your eyes are tired from looking at the monitor for long hours. It does read any form of text, including web pages, email, any text that is in a text box (window) and many file types, such as PDF, RTF, Word, etc... you can adjust the speed that it reads.
Cons:
Still sounds somewhat robotic because there is no voice inflection. It can be hard to understand when it pronounces certain words completely wrong, throwing off an important part of what it is reading. it's a little high priced but not unreasonable.
Review:

I first came across AT&T Natural Voices when I was trying to find some reasonable software that reads text out loud. I had a 250 page ebook that I had to read for a review I was doing and I could not buckle down and sit still long enough to soak up what the book was telling me. I had a lot of things to do and it was hard to sit there and read it so I began to explore different kinds of software available that does this kind of thing, and I came across a program called Ultra Hal Text To Speech Reader. It had a free trial that came with it and so I decided to give it a try. When I decided to purchase it, it came with additional software that can be purchased for a small price a long with Ultra Hal, and it was the AT&T Natural Voices Software.

I went ahead and selected that option as well, because the voice that came with the trial that I had tried were a little robotic and they had no voice inflection. Also, some of the words were completely mispronounced. The AT$T Natural Voices came as close as I think anyone will ever get with text to speech software. There are many different voices included, and although they sound more real than the default microsoft voices included in most text to speech software, they still don't have it down to sound 100% realistic. I don't think that its' achievable because of the whole voice infection thing, a machine just can't pull out from it what it doesn't have in it, and voice inflection is the one thing it just doesn't have.

Other than that, It's decent software, the voices aren't annoying, and there are other choices available, such as male & female, who also have names, such as Mike and Crystal, etc... and they are pleasant to listen to. But if you ever do get tired of hearing the same voice, there are other voices available in this software package. I feel the price is a little on the high side, but it's not unreasonable.

Features: It sythesizes text-to-speech from most document formats such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, PDF, RTF, text, and html.
it reads entire web pages, text windows, and email.

All in all, it is OK, especially when you don't feel like reading, or if your eyes hurt from looking at the monitor too long. But it still sounds a little robotic, and not COMPLETELY natural.

Conclusion:

Between purchasing it and not purchasing it, I would purchase it, because it was the closest thing I could find to not sounding totally robotic and annoying. There are other voices so you can swap out when you get tired of hearing one. It reads all kinds of different documents and emails, which I found to be convenient.