Balabolka is a very good text to speech program. It is very similar to TextAloud (and it is almost so good that TextAloud...).
You can separately the SAPI4 and the SAPI5 voices with this program, and you can reach all of them. You can save your readings into file (Wav (adjustable Hz) or MP3 (adjustable bit rate)).
There is a built in spell checker for some languages. You can set up hotkeys for some functions. And there are some other settings, just try it, and you'll see it.
There are seven available languages for the user interface (Czech, English, German, Hungarian, Portugese, Romanian, Russian).
And the best is all in this thing is that this software is totally FREEEEE!
(I even don't believe it yet... Thanks for the developpers!!)
If the seed is dead, you can download it from the author's site also:
http://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm
(You will find some free installable voices at the site, too.)
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Here is a short description of the program from the program's Help's main topic:
Balabolka (Text-To-Speech)
Balabolka is a Text-To-Speech (TTS) program. All computer voices installed on your system are available to Balabolka. Any plain text documents on your system can be opened for reading and editing via the "File|Open" menu. To create a new document, simply select "New" from the "File" menu.
Speech can be controlled using the standard play-pause-stop buttons found on the toolbar near the top of Balabolka. The program can read the clipboard content, view the text from DOC, RTF, PDF and HTML files, customize font and background colour, control reading from the system tray or by the global hotkeys.
The on-screen text can be saved as a WAV or MP3 file by selecting "Save Audio File..." from the "File" menu.
The program can use various versions of Microsoft Speech API (SAPI). It allows to alter a voice's parameters, including rate and pitch.
The user can apply a special substitution list to improve the quality of the voice's articulation. This feature is useful when you want to change the spelling of words or separating syllables. Balabolka uses two kinds of substitution lists:
the rules for the pronunciation correction use the syntax of VBscript and can be saved in the files with the extension *.ini;
files with the extension *.dic; this format is popular in Eastern Europe; the syntax of rules is simple, so the file can contain thousands of rules.
Files for the pronunciation correction are saved in the same folder where Balabolka was installed. If any file is used, the program highlights the whole sentence during reading; otherwise, the current word is highlighted.
* Balabolka is a Russian word, it can be translated as "chatterer".
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keywords for this document:
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text, to, TTS, voice, voices, sound, sounds
Russia, russian, freeware, free, windows
