How long before your narration comes free?

[Shrimpfarmer]

Narration.

It adds so much to a film but many people, myself included just don't like the thought of facing the microphone. Earlier today I read a post in another place about someone who wanted a program that could turn PDF files into MP3's. After a quick double take it became clear that he wanted a program that could read out PDF papers for him so that he could record them and listen to them on his commute. I tried this several years ago when I wanted to listen to some ebooks rather than read them. The technology then was not too good.

Anyhow, that got me thinking tonight about would it be possible to use such a program for making a voice over. We can all write text and so if we can find a computer voice to speak the words maybe that would work? Not being able to sleep because of these thoughts I dug through my old CD's and found a copy of the software I was using back then. I remember I had paid (not an insignificant sum) for the best voices going at the time from AT&T software. Unfortunately those voices proved pretty poor.

I have just visited the companys current website to see how things may have improved. The link below will take you to their demo site which allows you to type in upto 255 characters of text and have the latest computer voices (of which there are several) speak back what you typed. Using punctuation helps with the ways things are pronounced. Now, these voices are not perfect but do you know, they are not that bad either. What's even better is that you can choose whether to have the words played back to you online or download them free as a wav file. There does not appear to be any limit on the number of tests that you can run.

I was easily able to put together a narration of a few lines just by recording each sentence as a stand alone file. Its not quite there yet, but one day having a professional narrator included within the editing software will be as common as the flashy fx's are now.

Give it a try its quite amazing how things have improved.
http://wizzardsoftware.com/att_NV_demo.php

[RJ Johnston]

That could be tedious and take a while if you have more than a sentence or two. Eventually they will charge you, instead of making it free, if you want longer passages. Google may buy them out.

I've been using Text Aloud from http://www.nextup.com/

Text Aloud will read PDF and other formats.

I have some AT&T and NeoSpeech voices. I like the NeoSpeech voices the best, but I don't see that they offer those anymore. Glad I got those when I did.

If you have Magix Music Maker 15, you can use those AT&T and NeoSpeech voices with the text to speech facility, and then alter the voices for some cool effects.

[Dave McElderry]

I think they still have a long way to go before I'd think about using it for narration. However, as a tool for reading text it's probably more than adequate. I was amazed that it actually did a better job of pronouncing my last name than many people do. Thanks for the interesting diversion.

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

I am available for narration. Very reasonable rates...

[ed]

Magix Music Maker comes with a utility that will use what ever voices you have on your PC to read text. You can more and better vioces from companies but they can get rather pricey. I used it once and it was OK, but I had to chop up the words a little because they tended to run together a little to fast.

[SteveG]

Did you know that Adobe Reader 9 has a Read Out Loud feature? It's under the View menu. I have full-blown Acrobat 7 at work which also has it.

[RJ Johnston]

I don't know about later versions of Windows, but with Windows XP Pro, you can use the Windows Narrator: Start > All Programs > Accessories > Accessibility > Narrator.

You still need a better voice than Microsoft Sam, which is the default voice. If you purchase voices, you can make one of them the default voice in Control Panel > Speech.

EDIT: Well, I can't seem to get the other voices going with Narrator. All I get is Microsoft Sam.

[tiny]

Only if the voice is Morgan Freeman.

[Chuck Engels]

A few months ago I listened to 'The Penny' by Joyce Meyer and Deborah Bedford.
It was a very good book IMO, and the narrator/reader was Ellen Archer.
I was surprised at how great her voice is for this, she does an excellent job of telling the story.
Audio Book Sample
Be sure to click on #4 the Audio Sample, the other three audio tracks are parts of an interview with Joyce Meyer.
The book takes place in St. Louis in the late 50's and early 60's.


James Earl Jones would be a great voice as well