What is the app that changes text to audio?

Text-to-speech apps convert text into natural sounding speech. These apps allow users to have text read aloud using synthesized voices. Text-to-speech technology has many uses and benefits, such as assisting people with visual impairments or reading disabilities, enabling hands-free reading while multitasking, converting digital text into an audio format, and more. With the rise in digital content consumption on smartphones and tablets, text-to-speech apps have become quite popular for enabling continuous learning and productivity on the go. In this article, we will explore leading text-to-speech apps, how the technology works, key benefits and use cases, customization options, accessibility features, pricing models, and the future outlook for these useful productivity tools.

Popular Text-to-Speech Apps

Some of the most popular and well-known text-to-speech apps include NaturalReader, Voice Dream Reader, Speak it!, and @Voice Aloud Reader. These apps allow users to convert text from documents, web pages, PDFs, and more into natural sounding speech. Users can adjust the speed, pitch, volume, and voice of the audio output to customize it to their needs.

NaturalReader is available for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android. It supports over 20 languages and offers natural sounding voices. Voice Dream Reader is an iOS app offering high-quality voices and adaptive playback features tailored for reading long documents. Speak it! is a simple, streamlined iOS app that reads text aloud quickly. @Voice Aloud Reader for Android allows listening to web articles, blogs, documents, and more while multi-tasking.

These apps vary in price from free up to $30 for full versions. They provide user-friendly interfaces to quickly and easily convert text to speech. Many include high-quality voices, customization options, and tools to boost productivity and accessibility.

How Text-to-Speech Apps Work

Text-to-speech (TTS) apps convert text into human-like speech using speech synthesis technology. According to Text-to-Speech Technology: What It Is and How It Works, speech synthesis works by combining and rearranging phonemes to form words and sentences. Phonemes are basic units of sound in speech.

The process involves several components working together:

Text analysis – The text is scanned and parsed to extract pronunciations, pauses, emphasis, punctuation, and other needed speech elements.
Text normalization – Numbers, abbreviations, acronyms, etc. are converted into words.
Phonetic transcription – The text is converted into its phonemic representation based on the language.

Prosody generation – Appropriate pitch, timing, and volume patterns are generated based on the text’s grammatical structure.
Speech synthesis – Phonemes and prosody information are used to form words and sentences in natural, human-sounding speech.

Advanced TTS apps utilize deep learning and neural networks to produce increasingly human-like voices and intonations. The synthesized speech adapts to the text input and overall context to sound more expressive and natural.

Benefits of Text-to-Speech Apps

Text-to-speech apps provide significant benefits for people with reading disabilities such as dyslexia, visual impairments, and other issues that make reading difficult. As noted by Reading Rockets, text-to-speech technology can improve word recognition, increase the ability to pay attention and remember information while reading, and allow people to focus on comprehension instead of decoding words.

For those with visual impairments like blindness, text-to-speech apps provide a way to access written information that would otherwise be inaccessible. The text is read aloud by the app, often with options to adjust the speed, voice, and other settings to optimize understanding.

People with dyslexia can also benefit greatly from text-to-speech apps. Dyslexia makes reading very difficult, but listening to text instead allows dyslexic users to absorb the information more easily. This leads to better reading comprehension. By removing the barrier of decoding text, text-to-speech apps empower those with dyslexia to enjoy reading and learning.

In summary, by converting digital text into natural sounding speech, text-to-speech apps provide those with reading disabilities and visual impairments greater independence and equal access to information. The apps unlock written materials that users would otherwise struggle with or be unable to access at all.

Use Cases

Text-to-speech apps have a wide range of use cases. One of the most common is reading articles, books, documents and web pages (Weitzman). People use TTS to listen to content when they are unable to physically read it themselves, such as while driving, cooking or exercising.

Text-to-speech is also used by visually impaired people as an accessibility tool. It lets them consume written content through audio converted by the TTS engine.

In the educational setting, students with reading disabilities like dyslexia often use TTS to help them comprehend study materials better (Weitzman). The TTS technology reads out text for them, allowing them to focus on understanding the content.

On the enterprise side, customer support teams could leverage TTS to have customer emails and documents read aloud to them when going through many submissions. The natural voice quality afforded by modern AI TTS can help improve productivity.

Customization Features

Text-to-speech apps offer robust customization options to tailor the listening experience to individual users’ preferences. Key features include the ability to control the speed, accent, intonation, and voice.

Many apps allow users to choose between male and female voices or even celebrity voices. For example, the Typecast app features a “My Voice Maker” tool that uses AI to generate a unique custom voice based on the user’s own voice recordings. This level of personalization creates a more natural and enjoyable listening experience.

In addition to voice selection, most text-to-speech apps enable adjusting the speech rate to slow down or speed up the audio output. This is helpful for comprehension or when multitasking. Apps like Skyswitch also allow customizing pronunciation, intonation, pauses, and more using markup tags.

The ability to tailor text-to-speech to individual preferences makes the technology more versatile and valuable for a wider range of personal and professional applications.

Accessibility Features

Text-to-speech apps provide essential accessibility features for users with vision impairments, learning disabilities like dyslexia, or other challenges with reading written text. Some key accessibility features include:

Read aloud highlighting – as the app reads text aloud, it highlights the word or sentence being spoken so users can follow along. For example, Speechify has this feature.
Dyslexia-friendly fonts – apps like Speechify allow users to select fonts optimized for people with dyslexia or similar learning disabilities.

Customizable reading speed – users can adjust the words per minute rate based on their comprehension.
Voice selection – choose from a variety of natural-sounding male and female voices.

By leveraging these types of accessibility features, text-to-speech apps greatly benefit those who struggle with consuming written information. The apps empower users to gain knowledge, participate in education, engage with news/media, and complete other activities that require reading text.

Pricing and Availability

Top text-to-speech apps have different pricing tiers and availability across platforms. According to PCMag, premium options like NaturalReader start at $9.99 per month for advanced voices and customization features. Meanwhile, apps like Voice Dream Reader cost $14.99 on the App Store with in-app purchases available. The app Speechify has a free basic plan or $7.99 per month for premium access.

When comparing pricing, it’s also important to note availability across platforms like iOS, Android, Windows, and web apps. Per TechRadar, versatility comes at a cost with top cross-platform text-to-speech apps charging subscription fees compared to free built-in reading apps that work on single platforms only.

Future Advancements

Text-to-speech technology is rapidly evolving, with new advancements in neural TTS, voice cloning, and hyper-realistic voices on the horizon. According to recent industry analysis, key trends shaping the future of TTS include:

Increasingly human-like neural voices generated by deep learning models
Personalized voice cloning allowing users to create custom voices
Multi-speaker emotional TTS with adaptive intonation and prosody

Integration of TTS into more aspects of daily life via ambient computing

These innovations point towards a future where TTS voices are indistinguishable from human speakers. Users can expect customized voices tailored to their personal preferences across devices. TTS will likely expand from reading text aloud into facilitating more natural conversational interactions. As the technology continues maturing, it has the potential to greatly augment human communication and accessibility.

Conclusion

In summary, text-to-speech apps provide a valuable capability to convert written text into natural-sounding speech. This can benefit a variety of users, improving accessibility, convenience, comprehension, and multi-tasking. The versatility of these apps allows for customization, which enables people to optimize settings to suit personal preferences.

Text-to-speech apps help overcome reading challenges some users face, promote independence among people with visual impairments or difficulty reading, and enable engaging in other activities while consuming written material. The technology continues to advance with neural voices and real-time capabilities to transform text into audio smoothly and rapidly.

With the wide selection available, finding a reliable text-to-speech app that delivers clear audio output is now quite accessible. Most apps can convert digital text from files, webpages, PDFs, and more. The convenience, personalization, and usefulness of quality text-to-speech apps will likely lead to expanded mainstream adoption as people discover ways these tools can improve their lives.