free text to speech web site...who is the best

[joecomp2000]

I have tried Festival and that is leaving me wanting...
so far the best I have found is abc2mp3... that still needs work ...
a lot have a cap of 200 letters.. so any recommendation?
joe

[zapnosis]

I have little up to date experience with these. I used to use a program called SmartRead which worked quite nicely, but with any luck the standard will have risen since. Check out some freeware from download.com and try a few things out.

Don't forget that these will never be perfect. If you want it to sound human, get a microphone. Otherwise you have to be willing to adapt your work to get the most out of the program. Listen to how the program does cadence, where the gaps are, play around with spellings. For example, with the setup that I used to use, the last 3 words of a sentence always had the same cadence and a slight gap before them, so long sentences could sound very different to short ones.