http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/has a free text to audio utility named dspeech that will convert text to audio using any sapi4 or sapi5 voice installed on a system. This program is free and quite accessible.
Another very userfrinely text to audio conerter program is "text aloud" from Nextup (I hope i'm spelling this correctly.) This company also sells many high quality sapi voices. Text aloud is commercial software, however, and I find that Dspeech works just as well for me.
If you own K1000 or Open Book, these programs also have a text to audio conversion option to output in mp3 format.
The closest software speech that I found that sounded anythinglike Doubletalk was a software named "Monologue for Windows" that used to come bundled with Creative Labs Soundblaster cards in the win 3.11 days even befoer Creative Labs put out the version of Text Assist that was a licensed version of Dectalk Access. I think Monologue for windows also existed as standalone software but I have no idea who made it and if it is still being supported. Also, this was before the days of sapi speech of any version.
hth Doris At 09:37 AM 5/1/2009 -0700, you wrote:
I know it's a work around, but I vaguely recall hearing about methods to convert txt files to audio using a screen reader, or some other text to audio utility? E. G. I can adjust my JAWS voice to certainly read as well or better than DoubleTalk, and I could record JAWS reading a text file to an audio format like mp3; Then load that on a Stream or PlexTalk and at least have good speech quality for text file reading without relying on the built in TTS. Is there some simpler utility / method that accomplishes the same result? Especially a method that can handle large text files like books? And perhaps even convert text files to one of the DAISY audio formats that a Stream or PlexTalk could use, rather than just trying to create huge mp3 files.
