Text-to-Speech Software: How to Save Money by Creating Your Own Audio Books on Your Computer

It is now possible to create realistic sounding computer-generated voice. In the past computer voices sounded robotic. Today's high quality speech engines are capable of some impressive results. Computers can now produce speech with natural inflection which is so important in understanding human conversation. In this article I will show you the tools that I use to create an unlimited number of audio books. I download these books to my iPod and listen to them wherever I am.

The audio books produced with this method are more than acceptable in my opinion. I have had several people listen to the books that I have produced. Most of them agree the speech quality is good enough. None of the speech engines are perfect. Not every word will convert in an understandable way. This does cause some problems, however most of the time the context of the word in the sentence is sufficient for understanding the word.

Click this link to listen to this article spoken from an mp3 created with this method.

Before I get to the tools used to create these audio books I would like to give you some advice on where to find books that can be converted. If you're interested in the classics there is one website where you can download thousands of e-books. The Gutenberg Project (www.gutenberg.org) has an online website that archives thousands of free books. These books are offered in plain text which makes them easy to convert to speech. There are also several authors online who make copies of their books available in PDF format. These books can usually be purchased cheaper than the printed version. Doing a Google search for short stories will also find results which might interest you. I also copy and paste articles from online content producers such as Associated Content which allows me to listen to interesting articles away from my computer. Blogs are another source for interesting articles that can be copied and pasted into the text-to-speech application. Any text that you find interesting to read can make great audio listening.

I have tried several of the text-to-speech applications. The one that I consider best for creating audio books is TextAloud from NextUp.com. The features included with this application are outstanding for creating audio books. TextAloud will convert text to speech at 150 times real-time. This means that hundreds of pages of text can be converted to speech in just a matter of minutes. You have the ability to speed up or slow down the pace of the reading. This can greatly enhance intelligibility. TextAloud allows you to import text files, Word files, PDF files and HTML files. You can export your finished books as WAV files, WMA files or MP3 files. TextAloud currently cost $29.95.

To create high quality audio books you will need to purchase and download additional voice packs. NextUp.com sells the best text-to-speech voices available. My personal favorite voice is Daniel from Nuance RealSpeak. This is a British English male voice that costs an additional $45 above the cost of TextAloud. You can listen to samples of all the voices on their website. I also have two of the NeoSpeech voices. These voices are acceptable and they are only $35 apiece. The Nuance voices do a better job of formatting the text. Listen to the samples and make your decision based on what sounds best to your ears.

Now that you have the software and the voice pack, it's time to create some audio books. Open the TextAloud application. You will first need to set a couple of basic options so your books will output properly. Click on the options menu and select voices and file options. Click on the file options tab and you will see your output choices. From the drop-down box titled audio file format click on MP3. In the bit and sample rate drop down box I select the highest quality mono setting. You can experiment with this setting to produce smaller MP3s. If you're using a hard drive MP3 player and have plenty of room I would stick to the highest quality setting. Now select the right to file speed and set it to 150. If your computer has a hard time keeping up with the speed setting you can always tweak it down a little. The last option you need to change here is your output directory. Browse to a directory on your hard drive where you wish to save the audio books. Once you have all your options selected press the OK button and returned to the main screen. There is a drop-down box that allows you to select your desired voice. Make sure you select one of the high quality voices that you downloaded. The voices included with Windows XP are not acceptable for producing audio books.

Another feature included with TextAloud is a batch file converter. This is fantastic for creating multiple audio books without your intervention. Click the file menu and select batch file converter. The batch file converter window will open and allow you to browse to the books you wish to convert. If you're creating many books you might want to start the conversion before bedtime as this might take some time.

I usually do some basic editing of the text before I create the audio books. I will usually delete the table of contents and any other text that is not part of the story. I will sometimes add extra periods after titles and chapter numbers so the voice will pause at these points. One edit that can be difficult is to delete page numbers in the text. I will sometimes go through the text and manually delete all the page numbers. This can be time consuming but it makes listening to the book much more pleasurable.

Now that you have created your audio book simply use the software that came with your MP3 player to upload your books to the player. One important consideration when listening to audio books on an MP3 player is the ability to bookmark where you stopped listening last. If you're using iTunes you need to right-click on the audio book and select get info from the drop-down menu. Under the options tab is a selection titled remember playback position. Make sure that you place a check in the box beside this selection. This option allows your iPod to bookmark your position when you pause or shut down.

To start creating your own audio books will cost you a few bucks. If you take a look at the cost of audio books in your bookstore you will see the startup cost will quickly pay for itself. I hope you enjoy creating and listening to these books as much as I do.