AT&T Natural Voices Review

Natural voices - name says it all!

Submitted by toluse247 on Fri, 2010-07-23 12:18.
Author's Product Rating:
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The lowest price: 29$
You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
Pros:
It can read any form of text on your pc screen as long as it is txt, pdf, doc, rtf, html (and other web page texts), your emails. You can make it read at any speed desirable to you.
Cons:
It reads with a robotic sound (as do many other text readers). Sometimes, you don't know if a particular statement is a sentence or question.
Review:

I am a kind of person who prefers video or audio to plain text. I don't like reading very long text and I always buy products that are in video (or mp3) format. But some time ago, I bought a package and although it had videos, the most important part of the package were three 450-page ebooks. I ignored them for a while until I found I need the information in those ebooks. I then went looking for text readers all over the internet and I came across AT&T natural voices.

When I started to use AT&T Natural Voices, I tried it first on one of my essays and I found that the sound was a bit robotic but most of the words were well pronounced for a software. Then I decided to try it on my 3 giant ebooks and after I finished, I felt like I read the whole thing by myself. I had to pause the reading from time to time to check what the sentence was really talking about. Sometimes, I found that some words were pronounced outright wrong and I couldn't figure out if some statements were actually asking questions or making a comment.

I know that no software can achieve 100% human voice perfection but this doesn't really come that close either. It's better than the ordinary Microsoft robotic voice but it still has a bit of robotic tone in it and no voice inflection.

It has options for you to change to either male or female voices with names like Mike, etc. so you won't get tired of hearing the same voice. This is a cool feature because while the speech is not exactly annoying, you would often get tired of hearing the same old semi-robotic voice. I feel the price should not be that high but it's not totally outrageous.

Features: It Reads out texts from documents with formats like MS word, MS excel, PDF, TXT, RTF, HTML, etc.

Conclusion:

It's a pretty good software, not perfect but nearly the best you can find in the world of text-to-speech synthesizers. I'd buy this software if you really need it for reading you long (or even short) webpages, documents and emails.