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Quite a hefty chunk of our daily “computer” time is spent reading some sort of digital textual content, whether it’s online (e.g. Blogs, news articles), or offline (ebooks, general documents). However, proper reading (and hence, understanding) not just takes considerable time, but effort as well. This is where text to speech software (popularly known as TTS software) applications can help, as they make consuming even the most voluminous textual content super easy, by reading it aloud.

Not only that, these programs can also be immensely useful in other diverse fields, such as (second) language acquisition, and assisting the differently abled in learning. As you might’ve guessed by now, that’s what this article is focused on. So let’s jump in, and take a look at 9 of the best text to speech (TTS) software. NaturalReader NaturalReader supports a diverse array of (textual) file types from which it can read aloud textual content; and can also read the text on webpages. Just enter the source webpage URL, and NaturalReader will take it from there. However, even more impressive is its ability to read aloud text from images and scanned documents, thanks to built-in OCR functionality.

NaturalReader includes multiple natural sounding voices, and you can purchase additional voices in different languages (e.g German, Italian, Japanese). Del Amitri Twisted Rarlab on this page. With a number of other notable features like voice speed & pitch control, batch conversion of multiple documents to MP3 files NaturalReader, as a TTS software, ticks all the right boxes. Platform Availability: Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista, and XP; Mac OS X 10.9 and later Price: Paid versions start from $69.50, Free version with limited feature set available 2. Balabolka For those of you who do a lot of reading on the computer, and that too from a variety of files, Balabolka is a must have. What immediately sets it apart is its ability to read aloud from a huge number of file types, with DOCX, DJVU, PDF, EPUB, and RTF just being a few of them. Standard voice parameters like speech, pitch and volume can be adjusted in real-time. Balabolka can directly read aloud the text copied to clipboard, and more importantly, it comes with numerous tools, and these can be used to batch convert files, extract text from audio files, and do a lot more.