Make your Devices Read Out Text, With Text to Speech.
I read a lot of articles every day, but sometimes I prefer to listen to them. This method is faster, less eye strain and can be done anywhere. For example, I often listen to my saved articles in Pocket before bed.
Likewise, if you’re an aspiring writer, you can use this technique to quickly proofread your work before publishing it. This will help you find tiny mistakes in your letter that you would otherwise miss.
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For your device to speak text, you need a text-to-speech or TTS engine. Fortunately, it is built into most devices, so there is no need to download additional software.
TTS has also improved significantly over the past few years. Yes, it still doesn’t sound very natural, but it definitely works. I use TTS both for listening to my favorite article and for proofreading my work over the past year. And so far my experience is pretty good.
Use the text-to-speech feature on your device
Mac
Every Mac comes with built-in TTS so you can read any text on the screen. Just select text right click speech start speaking.
The accent is a bit robotic, but understandable. And, if you like, you can change the voice (for example, from male to female) and playback speed by going to the dictation and speech option in system preferences.
Windows
Windows doesn’t have built-in TTS like MAC, so you’ll have to download a third party TTS app. If you are only going to use this feature for web pages, use – speaker, this is a Chrome extension and requires internet to work.
However, if you want something more reliable, Natural reader is one of the best free TTS software out there. It’s free, available for both MAC and PC, and has all the great features you’ll ever need – for example, it’s compatible with any text, be it e-books, PDFs, or web pages. He can read any text.
iOS
Like Mac, iOS also has TTS built in. But first you have to enable it. To do this, go to Settings General Accessibility Speech. Here you will see two options – Speak Selection and Speech Screen. The first one will read the selected text, and the second one – everything that is displayed on the screen, including text ads.
Once enabled, select the text in any app on your iOS device and then tap on the speak option.
Android
Like iOS, Android also has TTS built in, but it only works if apps have this feature built in. Similar to Google Books, you can use TTS. However, you cannot select text and make it speak like we did in iOS.
But there is a simple solution. Just share a webpage with Pocket Android app and then use its TTS feature to read it aloud. To read text from other documents like PDF, Word document, e-books, etc., try Voice Aloud Reader.
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