text to speech software open source windows

SpeechBrain

Open-source conversational ai for everyone.

Key Features

Open, simple, flexible, well-documented, and with competitive performance.

SpeechBrain supports state-of-the-art technologies for speech recognition, enhancement, separation, text-to-speech, speaker recognition, speech-to-speech translation, spoken language understanding, and beyond.

SpeechBrain encompasses a wide range of audio technologies, including vocoding, audio augmentation, feature extraction, sound event detection, beamforming, and other multi-microphone signal processing capabilities.

SpeechBrain offers user-friendly tools for training Language Models, supporting technologies ranging from basic n-gram LMs to modern Large Language Models. Our platform seamlessly integrates them into speech processing pipelines and facilitates the creation of customizable chatbots.

SpeechBrain leverages the most advanced deep learning technologies, including methods for self-supervised learning, continual learning, diffusion models, Bayesian deep learning, and interpretable neural networks.

Research & Development

SpeechBrain is engineered to accelerate the research and development of Conversational AI technologies. It comes with pre-built recipes for popular datasets. Extensive documentation and tutorials are available to support newcomers.

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SpeechBrain offers pre-trained models with user-friendly interfaces, making tasks like transcription, speaker verification, speech enhancement, and source separation easier than ever.

Why SpeechBrain?

• Easy to install
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Adapts to your needs.

You can install speechbrain via pypi for quick access to its functionalities, or through a local install for accessing recipes and delving deeper into the toolkit., a single command., each speechbrain recipe defines all hyperparameters into a single yaml file. the training process is then orchestrated by a python script., built for research., speechbrain is designed for research and development. hence, flexibility, transparency, and replicability are core concepts to enhance our daily workflows. users can easily define custom deep learning models, losses, training/evaluation loops, and input pipelines/transformations, and easily integrate into existing pipelines..

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Best text-to-speech software for Windows

Want to listen instead of read? These text-to-speech solutions make it easy to convert text into audio on Windows PCs.

Quick Links

Natural reader, microsoft edge, office immersive reader.

You may occasionally be in a situation where reading isn't the most convenient thing to do. Or, you might just not be able to read easily. There's plenty of content out there that's already in audio or video form, but if you want to consume an article or document you came across without actually reading it, you'll need to use something called text-to-speech conversion.

There are multiple tools that convert written text into spoken dialog, and they can be a very handy way of "reading" information when you don't have time to sit down and gaze attentively at your laptop screen. Many of these solutions are available for Windows 11 PCs (and earlier versions), so if you're in a situation where you want to listen to something instead of reading it, check out the following apps and services.

The best, for a price

The top pick here has to go to Natural Reader, an online platform that offers an incredibly robust solution for text-to-speech conversion. Natural Reader has many facets, starting with a web interface that lets you paste text into a box or upload a document, PDF file, or even an image. Indeed, it has optical character recognition, so it can even read images for you. It's quite impressive.

Additionally, you can install it as a browser extension, making it easy to read any content you come across online. The extension lets you quickly read a page as it highlights the content it's reading, and it lets you click anywhere to skip a section. There's also a mobile app, if you want to use it on your phone.

The good and the bad of Natural Reader come from its voices. The app offers excellent voices to choose from, but most of them are only available in the Plus plan, and you're limited to 5 minutes a day if you don't want to pay $110 per year. There are also some less advanced Premium voices, which cost $60 per year, and you can use 20 minutes of those for free every day, but these are not as impressive. Unfortunately, beyond that, the only voices available are Microsoft's Zira, David, and Mark, which are very basic and limited to U.S. English. All other languages require you to pay up. The other downside is that the app is fully internet-based, so you can't use it without a connection.

If those limitations aren't a problem, or if you're willing to pay, Natural Reader is a terrific choice.

Natural Reader is arguably the best solution for listening to written text as spoken dialog. It has lots of natural-sounding voices, a modern UI, and plenty of features, including a browser extension.

Best reader for online content

Yes, Microsoft Edge is a web browser , so calling it a text-to-speech tool may seem disingenuous. But frankly, Edge offers one of the very best experiences you can get in this field. Microsoft's browser lets you read any webpage or PDF file you open in it, and it offers a wide selection of natural-sounding voices in multiple languages, making it a phenomenal solution for listening to written content. You can even combine it with Immersive Reader to get a more focused reading experience.

The only notable downside to Edge is that it works only with web content or PDF files, so if you run into text somewhere else, you have to paste it into a file and save it as a PDF. And, of course, most people use a browser other than Edge, so you'll probably have to change your default browser for this to be a very convenient solution. Still, if you're fine with that, it works wonders.

Microsoft Edge may be a web browser, but its built-in read-aloud feature is one of the best experiences you can get for text-to-speech conversion. It features natural-sounding voices and, best of all, it's totally free.

Best free online TTS tool

Another great option for listening to written text is TTSMaker, which is another totally free solution that works on any browser. TTSMaker's strengths are in its voices, with a wide range of options to choose from. From what we could test, they all sound quite natural and less affected than the voices in a lot of other solutions out there. And, again, you can't beat the price.

TTSMaker also lets you export the audio conversion as an MP3 file, so if you want to listen to the audio later, you can, even if you don't have internet access at the moment.

The downsides are mostly in the character limit. Whenever you want to convert text, you're limited to a maximum of 10,000 characters on the default voice, or 8,000 for most other voices. You can always start a new session to overcome that, though, and there aren't any daily time limits, so you still have some breathing room.

The other downside is that, of course, you need an internet connection to access the website, and you don't get a browser extension or anything, so it's much more of a manual process. Still, that's the case for many of these tools, and this is a great one, all things considered.

TTSMaker is a website for converting written text into spoken dialog. It offers a wide range of natural-sounding languages that are available free of cost. It can also export an audio file. However, it's limited to a maximum of 10,000 characters in a single piece of text.

Best TTS browser extension

If you're seeking a more convenient solution for reading webpages out loud, the TTS

Readme TTS is a browser extension compatible with Chrome-based browsers, and it offers text-to-speech capabilities on any website you visit, in addition to reading any text you copy into it. It also supports uploading documents. Finally, it uses Google Translate voices for free, although you can pay for higher-quality voices.

extension is a great, free solution that might just do the trick for you. As an extension, it lives on the menu bar in your browser, and you can click its button at any time to bring up the interface. Just press the Play button to start reading the current page. You can also paste text into the text box to read a specific bit of content, if you want.

One cool thing about this extension is that, in addition to the default Microsoft voices, it also has the option to use Google Translate voices for reading, so you get slightly more natural-sounding speech without having to pay up. And if you do want to pay for them, you can also use Google Cloud's API for text-to-speech conversion, which sounds even better.

TTS Text To Speech also has a nice, clean UI. And while it opens as an overlay on your current page, you can minimize to a small bar so that you're free to keep browsing while you listen to whatever is playing in the extension.

Best for Microsoft Office

If you're not on the web and you want to read documents out loud that you're working on in Microsoft Office, the built-in Immersive Reader in the Office apps is a good option. Immersive reader is available in apps like Word and OneNote, and in addition to making text larger and easier to read, it gives you a "Read aloud" option, so you can listen to that text instead.

Unlike the feature in Microsoft Edge, things are more limited in Office. You don't get the same natural-sounding voices, but they still sound better than the robotic voices that are still built into Windows, and you can adjust the reading speed to your liking. You do need to be connected to the internet to get these nicer voices, though. Otherwise, Office falls back to the voices built into Windows.

Regardless, this is a great solution that doesn't require you to install or pay for anything extra. You can access Immersive Reader in the Office from the View tab.

Simple offline reader

Say you don't want to use the internet at all, and you want to be able to read aloud any text you run across offline. That's where an app like Panopreter comes in. This is a simple text-to-speech tool that lets you paste text or open a variety of files, such as Word and PDF documents, to read out loud. Panopreter uses the voices installed on your PC, so you'll be limited to the built-in Windows voices that don't sound all that natural. Still, it's an effective way to read any text you want, and you can change the speed and pitch of the voice to your liking.

Panopreter also lets you import batches of files to read, and you can also export readings of text as audio files to listen to at any time. It's a fairly straightforward and simple app, but it does the job it sets out to do.

Panopreter is a desktop text-to-speech app that can read text and documents out loud, using voices installed on your computer. It offers options like opening batches of files and exporting readings as audio files for listening at a later time.

More powerful offline options

If you want a more powerful reader for offline use, Balabolka is an even better option than Panopreter. The Balabolka UI can definitely be overwhelming at first, but that's largely because its customization and granular features aren't always the easiest to use. You have options for customizing the font and color of text, choosing a secondary voice for reading foreign terms in the text, and much more. Balabolka also uses the languages installed on your system, so it might not be the best unless you've found some speech packs elsewhere. However, it does the job.

Similar to Panopreter, Balabolka lets you export audio conversions as audio files for easy listening at any time. It even supports batch conversions, so you can select multiple text files at once and turn them all into audio. It's certainly a capable app, although its abundance of features may not be optimal for everyone.

Balabolka is an advanced speech-to-text conversion tool with loads of options available for formatting and reading text, including support for different voice APIs and the ability to read foreign words even in an English text.

Final thoughts

These are all great options in their own right, although it's hard to deny that the best ones are those that rely on the internet. These have the best voices, which really promote a natural listening experience, and the web is where you'll most likely be using this kind of tool anyway. My personal favorite would be the Microsoft Edge immersive reader, both for its terrific quality and the fact that it's free. But if you're willing to pay, Natural Reader is phenomenal too.

Best text-to-speech software of 2024

Boosting accessibility and productivity

• Best overall
• Best realism
• Best for developers
• Best for podcasting
• How we test

The best text-to-speech software makes it simple and easy to convert text to voice for accessibility or for productivity applications.

1. Best overall 2. Best realism 3. Best for developers 4. Best for podcasting 5. Best for developers 6. FAQs 7. How we test

Finding the best text-to-speech software is key for anyone looking to transform written text into spoken words, whether for accessibility purposes, productivity enhancement, or creative applications like voice-overs in videos. 

Text-to-speech (TTS) technology relies on sophisticated algorithms to model natural language to bring written words to life, making it easier to catch typos or nuances in written content when it's read aloud. So, unlike the best speech-to-text apps and best dictation software , which focus on converting spoken words into text, TTS software specializes in the reverse process: turning text documents into audio. This technology is not only efficient but also comes with a variety of tools and features. For those creating content for platforms like YouTube , the ability to download audio files is a particularly valuable feature of the best text-to-speech software.

While some standard office programs like Microsoft Word and Google Docs offer basic TTS tools, they often lack the comprehensive functionalities found in dedicated TTS software. These basic tools may provide decent accuracy and basic options like different accents and languages, but they fall short in delivering the full spectrum of capabilities available in specialized TTS software.

To help you find the best text-to-speech software for your specific needs, TechRadar Pro has rigorously tested various software options, evaluating them based on user experience, performance, output quality, and pricing. This includes examining the best free text-to-speech software as well, since many free options are perfect for most users. We've brought together our picks below to help you choose the most suitable tool for your specific needs, whether for personal use, professional projects, or accessibility requirements.

The best text-to-speech software of 2024 in full:

Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.

Below you'll find full write-ups for each of the entries on our best text-to-speech software list. We've tested each one extensively, so you can be sure that our recommendations can be trusted.

The best text-to-speech software overall

1. NaturalReader

Our expert review:

Reasons to buy

Reasons to avoid.

If you’re looking for a cloud-based speech synthesis application, you should definitely check out NaturalReader. Aimed more at personal use, the solution allows you to convert written text such as Word and PDF documents, ebooks and web pages into human-like speech.  

Because the software is underpinned by cloud technology, you’re able to access it from wherever you go via a smartphone, tablet or computer. And just like Capti Voice, you can upload documents from cloud storage lockers such as Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive.  

Currently, you can access 56 natural-sounding voices in nine different languages, including American English, British English, French, Spanish, German, Swedish, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch. The software supports PDF, TXT, DOC(X), ODT, PNG, JPG, plus non-DRM EPUB files and much more, along with MP3 audio streams. 

There are three different products: online, software, and commercial. Both the online and software products have a free tier.

Read our full NaturalReader review .

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The best text-to-speech software for realistic voices

Specializing in voice synthesis technology, Murf uses AI to generate realistic voiceovers for a range of uses, from e-learning to corporate presentations. 

Murf comes with a comprehensive suite of AI tools that are easy to use and straightforward to locate and access. There's even a Voice Changer feature that allows you to record something before it is transformed into an AI-generated voice- perfect if you don't think you have the right tone or accent for a piece of audio content but would rather not enlist the help of a voice actor. Other features include Voice Editing, Time Syncing, and a Grammar Assistant.

The solution comes with three pricing plans to choose from: Basic, Pro and Enterprise. The latter of these options may be pricey but some with added collaboration and account management features that larger companies may need access to. The Basic plan starts at around $19 / £17 / AU$28 per month but if you set up a yearly plan that will drop to around $13 / £12 / AU$20 per month. You can also try the service out for free for up to 10 minutes, without downloads.

The best text-to-speech software for developers

3. Amazon Polly

Alexa isn’t the only artificial intelligence tool created by tech giant Amazon as it also offers an intelligent text-to-speech system called Amazon Polly. Employing advanced deep learning techniques, the software turns text into lifelike speech. Developers can use the software to create speech-enabled products and apps. 

It sports an API that lets you easily integrate speech synthesis capabilities into ebooks, articles and other media. What’s great is that Polly is so easy to use. To get text converted into speech, you just have to send it through the API, and it’ll send an audio stream straight back to your application. 

You can also store audio streams as MP3, Vorbis and PCM file formats, and there’s support for a range of international languages and dialects. These include British English, American English, Australian English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Danish and Russian. 

Polly is available as an API on its own, as well as a feature of the AWS Management Console and command-line interface. In terms of pricing, you’re charged based on the number of text characters you convert into speech. This is charged at approximately $16 per1 million characters , but there is a free tier for the first year.

The best text-to-speech software for podcasting

In terms of its library of voice options, it's hard to beat Play.ht as one of the best text-to-speech software tools. With almost 600 AI-generated voices available in over 60 languages, it's likely you'll be able to find a voice to suit your needs. 

Although the platform isn't the easiest to use, there is a detailed video tutorial to help users if they encounter any difficulties. All the usual features are available, including Voice Generation and Audio Analytics. 

In terms of pricing, Play.ht comes with four plans: Personal, Professional, Growth, and Business. These range widely in price, but it depends if you need things like commercial rights and affects the number of words you can generate each month. 

The best text-to-speech software for Mac and iOS

5. Voice Dream Reader

There are also plenty of great text-to-speech applications available for mobile devices, and Voice Dream Reader is an excellent example. It can convert documents, web articles and ebooks into natural-sounding speech. 

The app comes with 186 built-in voices across 30 languages, including English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese and Korean. 

You can get the software to read a list of articles while you drive, work or exercise, and there are auto-scrolling, full-screen and distraction-free modes to help you focus. Voice Dream Reader can be used with cloud solutions like Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, Pocket, Instapaper and Evernote. 

The best text-to-speech software: FAQs

What is the best text-to-speech software for youtube.

If you're looking for the best text-to-speech software for YouTube videos or other social media platforms, you need a tool that lets you extract the audio file once your text document has been processed. Thankfully, that's most of them. So, the real trick is to select a TTS app that features a bountiful choice of natural-sounding voices that match the personality of your channel. 

What’s the difference between web TTS services and TTS software?

Web TTS services are hosted on a company or developer website. You’ll only be able to access the service if the service remains available at the whim of a provider or isn’t facing an outage.

TTS software refers to downloadable desktop applications that typically won’t rely on connection to a server, meaning that so long as you preserve the installer, you should be able to use the software long after it stops being provided. 

Do I need a text-to-speech subscription?

Subscriptions are by far the most common pricing model for top text-to-speech software. By offering subscription models for, companies and developers benefit from a more sustainable revenue stream than they do from simply offering a one-time purchase model. Subscription models are also attractive to text-to-speech software providers as they tend to be more effective at defeating piracy.

Free software options are very rarely absolutely free. In some cases, individual voices may be priced and sold individually once the application has been installed or an account has been created on the web service.

How can I incorporate text-to-speech as part of my business tech stack?

Some of the text-to-speech software that we’ve chosen come with business plans, offering features such as additional usage allowances and the ability to have a shared workspace for documents. Other than that, services such as Amazon Polly are available as an API for more direct integration with business workflows.

Small businesses may find consumer-level subscription plans for text-to-speech software to be adequate, but it’s worth mentioning that only business plans usually come with the universal right to use any files or audio created for commercial use.

How to choose the best text-to-speech software

When deciding which text-to-speech software is best for you, it depends on a number of factors and preferences. For example, whether you’re happy to join the ecosystem of big companies like Amazon in exchange for quality assurance, if you prefer realistic voices, and how much budget you’re playing with. It’s worth noting that the paid services we recommend, while reliable, are often subscription services, with software hosted via websites, rather than one-time purchase desktop apps. 

Also, remember that the latest versions of Microsoft Word and Google Docs feature basic text-to-speech as standard, as well as most popular browsers. So, if you have access to that software and all you’re looking for is a quick fix, that may suit your needs well enough. 

How we test the best text-to-speech software

We test for various use cases, including suitability for use with accessibility issues, such as visual impairment, and for multi-tasking. Both of these require easy access and near instantaneous processing. Where possible, we look for integration across the entirety of an operating system , and for fair usage allowances across free and paid subscription models.

At a minimum, we expect an intuitive interface and intuitive software. We like bells and whistles such as realistic voices, but we also appreciate that there is a place for products that simply get the job done. Here, the question that we ask can be as simple as “does this piece of software do what it's expected to do when asked?”

Read more on how we test, rate, and review products on TechRadar .

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John (He/Him) is the Components Editor here at TechRadar and he is also a programmer, gamer, activist, and Brooklyn College alum currently living in Brooklyn, NY. 

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11 More Free Open-source Text-To-Speech Apps

Hazem Abbas

What is TTS?

Text-to-speech is a technology that allows you to convert and read written text into a digital text aloud which you save in an audio format file. Many also call it "Read aloud".

TTS apps are handy tools in converting text or text files into a speech in a sound format, especially for students, content creators, and daily users.

Here, we offer you the best text-to-speech packages to covert and create written text into a speech without having to dive into the technical side.

1- TTS Tool

TTS Tool is a free web-based TTS service that allows you to choose which voice and TTS engine provider as well as language to transform your written text into digital audio file then download it to your computer.

You can also control the volume, the rate, and the voice pitch, as well as select a voice or an accent for many languages, and male or female voice.

2- Windows TTS

Windows TTS is a lightweight yet feature-rich TTS program for Windows. It works completely offline and comes with a straightforward interface.

3- Central Access Reader

Central Access Reader (CAR) is a free, open source, text-to- speech application designed specifically for students with print-related disabilities.  CAR reads Word Docs and pasted text using the voice installed on your computer.  CAR has an intuitive interface and many customizable features.

The program is available for Windows, and macOS.

4- Simple TTS Reader

Simple TTS Reader is a small clipboard reader. Simply copy any text, and it will be read aloud. You can select any installed speech engine, e.g., Microsoft Anna. This text-to-speech utility can also be minimized to tray.

Simple TTS Reader is an alternative to such applications and utilities like Sayz Me, Speakonia, Ultra Hal Text-to-Speech Reader and others. Simple TTS Reader supports most operating systems (Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10) , doesn't tweak your system settings, 100% free and open-source.

The app is written by Dmitry Maluev.

5- eSpeak Text-to-speech

eSpeak is a compact open-source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows.

eSpeak uses a "formant synthesis" method. This allows many languages to be provided in a small size. The speech is clear, and can be used at high speeds, but is not as natural or smooth as larger synthesizers which are based on human speech recordings.

eSpeak supports dozens of languages and comes with many handy features, which you can check here .

6- Balabolka

Balabolka is a Text-To-Speech (TTS) program. All computer voices installed on your system are available to Balabolka . The on-screen text can be saved as an audio file. The program can read the clipboard content, extract text from documents, customize font and background colour, control reading from the system tray or by the global hotkeys.

It supports text file formats: AZW, AZW3, CHM, DjVu, DOC, DOCX, EML, EPUB, FB2, FB3, HTML, LIT, MD, MOBI, ODP, ODS, ODT, PDB, PRC, PDF, PPT, PPTX, RTF, TCR, WPD, XLS, XLSX.

The program uses various versions of Microsoft Speech API (SAPI) ; it allows to alter a voice's parameters, including rate and pitch. The user can apply a special substitution list to improve the quality of the voice's articulation. This feature is useful when you want to change the spelling of words. The rules for the pronunciation correction use the syntax of regular expressions.

7- Online TTS

Online TTS is a free web-based text-to-speech app that allows anyone to convert written text into speech. It uses ResponsiveVoice.js library that is originally designed to add voice option to any website.

8- QPicoSpeaker

Qt frontend for pico2wave text to speech console program for Linux systems. It offers few languages support comparing to other TTS apps on this list. The supported languages are: English (US), English (UK), German, Spanish, French, and Italian.

The app is still a work in progress, so expected new added features in the next releases.

9- Voice Builder

Voice Builder is an open source text-to-speech (TTS) voice building tool that focuses on simplicity, flexibility, and collaboration. Our tool allows anyone with basic computer skills to run voice training experiments and listen to the resulting synthesized voice.

We hope that this tool will reduce the barrier for creating new voices and accelerate TTS research, by making experimentation faster and interdisciplinary collaboration easier. We believe that our tool can help improve TTS research, especially for low-resourced languages, where more experimentation are often needed to get the most out of the limited data.

10- Gespeaker

• Gespeaker is a text to speech GTK+ front-end for eSpeak and mbrola to play a text in many languages with settings for voice, pitch, volume and speed.

11- TensorVox

TensorVox is an application designed to enable user-friendly and lightweight neural speech synthesis in the desktop, aimed at increasing accessibility to such technology.

Powered mainly by TensorFlowTTS and also by Coqui-TTS and VITS , it is written in pure C++/Qt, using the Tensorflow C API for interacting with Tensorflow models (first two), and LibTorch for PyTorch ones. This way, we can perform inference without having to install gigabytes worth of Python libraries, just a few DLLs.

Before we finalize this post, it is important to note that we published another article that also include TTS libraries and frameworks, which you can find it here.

If you know of any other open-source free TTS app that we did not mention here, let us know.

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Top 6 Open Source TTS Engine

The Text-to-Speech Engine technology (more commonly known as TTS) is used to create a voice version of the text document.

The rise in the use of digital devices, and the growing dependence upon voice recognition and similar technologies, TTS is gaining prominence.

But, the applications of the technology don’t just stop there. With the help of this technology, you can convert the text emails into voice recordings. It can also help the visually challenged people to understand text content.

We will be looking at some of the best open source TTS engine tools through this blog. This will help us understand their features and benefits more clearly.

Top Open Source TTS Tools

Cmu flite tts.

MARY Text-to-Speech is a multilingual TTS synthesis platform that supports English (British and American), French, German, Italian, Russian, and many other languages.

• Uses preprocessing techniques like tokenizer and numerical expansion.
• It uses multi-threaded network architecture processes multiple requests in parallel.
• It is flexible in nature so that you can use both pure Java models and external models.
• It uses XML structures to improve transparency and is easy to understand for common users.

eSpeak is a compact open-source text to speech engine that is available for both Windows and Linux. It supports English and many other languages. Let us take a quick look at some of its key features:

• This platform can easily do the text to phoneme translations. This helps the system to understand the meaning of the text and helps it to translate and pick up the pronunciations accordingly.
• eSpeakinG synthesizer, which converts vowels and sonorant consonants to complete the sound with sound addition technology.
• Klatt synthesizer uses a similar technique but with subtractive synthesis. It uses digital filters to understand the difference between consonants, vowels, and sonorants.
• This tool was used by Google Translate in 2010 because of its differentiation technology and speed to convert the text into voice.
• The sound quality of voices is clear and soothing to ears.

It is a lightning-fast, open-source TTS engine and its core features include:

• As it is based on FLITE technology, you can customize how the voice sounds.
• It is a small latency platform and uses a limited resource footprint.
• It works seamlessly on Linux, Android, and Windows.
• Currently, this tool is working on bringing realistic voices to people with speech disorders.

Also Read: Everything You Need to Know About Google Duplex

Festival Lite is more commonly known as Flite. It is a small, run time engine that is considered to be one of the fastest TTS engines.

As it is an open-source engine, it is free, and you can do many customizations. Hence many of the companies are opting for this TTS engine. Let us look at some of its core features:

• It can be used for both small and large files.
• It is thread-safe, and its latest version provides a hassle-free TTS conversion.
• It is compatible with Windows, Linux, and Android.
• It is also available in multiple languages.

MBROLA stands for Multi-Band Resynthesis OverLap Add. MBROLA is also one of the prominently used open-source TTS engines. And it provides support for many of the spoken languages. Let’s take a quick look at some of its key features:

• It provides a multilingual database.
• It is useful for in-house text to speech conversions.
• It was a non-commercial software earlier but is now launched as an open-source TTS engine.
• It provides pleasant sound quality with consistency and accuracy in voice pitch.

YakiToMe allows you to convert text files into voice files easily. You can download the voice files into MP3 audio files. Let us understand the salient features of it.

• The engine not only supports .doc, txt, and .pdf files, but it also supports.HTML, RSS, and email files.
• You can download the portable files and save them on your desktop, tablets, and smartphones.
• It also provides a social platform from which you can search subscribe to files created by other users.
• It offers support in English, French, and Spanish.
• It provides voice, speech speed, and pronunciation controls.

Key Takeaways:

With the above-mentioned tools, we can understand that open source tts engines can be used widely to convert text from different languages. We can also use these engines to create social platforms, in-house utilities, and much more.

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Open-Source Text To Speech App

Stable Speech uses the built-in speech engine in your operating system. Hence, it's truly unlimited. Feel free to contribute your valuable knowledge on GitHub . Who knows, we might become the Linux of text-to-speech applications.

We ♥️ open source. Made by Icelabs .

The Best (Free) Speech-to-Text Software for Windows

Looking for the best free speech-to-text software on Windows? We compare speech recognition options from Dragon, Google, and Microsoft.

Looking for the best free speech to text software on Windows?

The best speech-to-text software is Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) but it comes at a price. But how does it compare to the best of the free programs, like Google Docs Voice Typing (GDVT) and Windows Speech Recognition (WSR)?

This article compares Dragon against Google Docs Voice Typing and Windows Speech Recognition for three typical uses:

• Writing novels.
•  Academic transcription.
• Writing business documents like memos.

Comparing Speech Recognition Software: Dragon Vs. Google Vs Microsoft

We will look at the nuances between the three below, but here's an overview on their pros and cons which will help you quickly make a decision.

1. Dragon Speech Recognition

Dragon Naturally Speaking beats Microsoft's and Google's software in voice recognition.

DNS scores 10% better on average compared to both programs. But is Dragon Naturally Speaking worth the money?

It depends on what you're using it for. For seamless, high-accuracy writing that will require little proof-reading, DNS is the best speech-to-text software around.

2. Windows Speech Recognition

If you don't mind proofreading your documents, WSR is a great free speech-recognition software.

On the downside, it requires that you use a Windows computer. It's also only about 90% accurate, making it the least accurate out of all the voice recognition software tested in this article.

However, it's integrated into the Windows operating system, which means it can also control the computer itself, such as shutdown and sleep.

3. Google Docs Voice Typing

Google Docs Voice Typing is highly limited in how and where you use it. It only works in Google Docs, in the Chrome Browser, and with an internet connection.

But it offers several options on mobile devices. Android smartphones have the ability to transcribe your voice to text using the same speech-to-text engine that also works with Google Keep or Live Transcribe.

And while Dragon Naturally Speaking offers a mobile app, it's treated as a separate purchase from the desktop client.

Dragon and Microsoft work in any place you can enter text. However, WSR can execute control functions whereas Dragon is mostly limited to text input.

Download : Live Transcribe for Android (Free)

Speech-to-Text Testing Methods

In order to test the accuracy of the dictation with the tools, I read aloud three texts:

• Charles Darwin's "On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties"
• H.P. Lovecraft's "Call of Cthulhu"
• California Governor Jerry Brown's 2017 State of the State speech

When a speech-to-text software miscapitalized a word, I marked the text as blue in the right-column (see graphic below). When one of the software got a word wrong, the misspelled word was marked in red. I did not consider wrong capitalizations to be errors.

I used a Blue Yeti microphone which is the best microphone for podcasting  and a relatively fast computer. However, you don't need any special hardware. Any laptop or smartphone transcribes speech as well as a more expensive machine.

Test 1: Dragon Naturally Speaking Speech-to-Text Accuracy

Dragon scored 100% on accuracy on all three sample texts. While it failed to capitalize the first letter on every text, it otherwise performed beyond my expectations.

While all three transcription suites do a great job of accurately turning spoken words into written text, DNS comes out way ahead of its competitors. It even successfully understood complicated words such as "hitherto" and "therein".

Test 2: Google Docs Voice Typing Speech-to-Text Accuracy

Google Docs Voice Typing had many errors compared to Dragon. GDVT got 93.5% right on Lovecraft, 96.5% correc t for Brown, and 96.5% for Darwin. Its average accuracy came out to around 95.2% for all three texts.

On the downside, it automatically capitalized a lot of words that didn't need capitalization. It seems the engine also hasn't improved in accuracy since I last tested GDVT three years ago.

Test 3: Microsoft Windows Speech Recognition Text-to-Speech Accuracy

Microsoft's Windows Speech Recognition came in last. Its accuracy on Lovecraft was 84.3% , although it did not miscapitalize any words like GDVT. For Brown's speech, it got its highest accuracy rating of around 94.8% , making it equivalent to GDVT.

For Darwin's book, it managed to get a similarly high score of 93.1% . Its average accuracy across all texts came out to 89% .

Related: The Best Free Text-to-Speech Tools for Educators

Are Free Transcription Services Worth Using?

• Dragon Naturally Speaking got a perfect 100% accuracy for voice transcription.
• Microsoft's free voice-to-text service, Windows Speech Recognition scored an 89% accuracy.
• Google Docs Voice Typing got a total score of 95.2% accuracy.

However, there are some major limitations to free text-to-speech options you should always keep in mind.

GDVT only works in the Chrome browser. On top of that, it only works for Google Docs. If you need to enter something in a spreadsheet or in a word processor other than Google Docs, you are out of luck.

Our test results indicate it is more accurate than WSR, but you have to keep in mind that it only works in Chrome for Google Docs. And you will always need an internet connection.

WSR can make you more productive with its hands-off computer automation features. Plus, it can enter text. Its accuracy is the weakest out of the services that I tested.

That said, you can live with its misses if you are not a heavy transcriber. It's on par with Google Docs Voice Typing but limited to Windows.

For most users, the free options should be good enough. However, for all those who need high levels of transcription accuracy, Dragon Naturally Speaking is the best option around. As an occasional user, if you need a free service, Google Docs Voice Typing is a viable alternative.

These tools prove that your voice can make you more productive. Now, try out Google Voice Assistant  which is the best voice-control assistant you can use right now to manage everyday tasks.

Plus, be sure to check out these free online services to download text to speech as MP3 .

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Top 10 Best Open-Source Text to Speech Software

Home > Text-to-Speech > Top 10 Best Open-Source Text to Speech Software

Karen William

• Filed to: Text-to-Speech

47886 views, 4 min read

Open source text to speech refers to publicly accessible code related to text-to-speech technology. Copyright holders of open-source software grant users the rights to use, study, modify, and distribute the software and its source code for any purpose. Open-source software can be developed collaboratively and openly. As for text-to-speech, it refers to the process of transforming provided text into speech using technology.

4. YakiToMe

6. coqui tts, 7. cmu flite tts, 9. festival speech synthesis system, 10. tacotron2, pros of open source text to speech, cons of open source text to speech, why choose voxbox, part 1: top 10 open source text to speech software.

MaryTTS is an open-source multilingual text-to-speech synthesis platform written in Java. It was originally developed as a collaborative project between the DFKI Language Technology Lab and the Saarland University Speech Research Institute. It is now maintained by the Multimodal Speech Processing Group of MMCI and DFKI's Advanced Research Group.

As of version 5.2, MaryTTS supports German, British and American English, French, Italian, Luxembourgish, Russian, Swedish, Telugu, and Turkish; with more languages in preparation.

Main Features

Multilingual Support: MaryTTS supports multiple languages, including English, German, French, etc., suitable for global users.

Modular Architecture: MaryTTS adopts a modular architecture, allowing users to choose and add specific speech synthesis modules according to their needs.

Rich Speech Synthesis Features: MaryTTS offers rich speech synthesis features, including pronunciation adjustment, volume control, speed adjustment, etc., allowing users to customize according to their needs.

Limitations:

Mimic is a series of text-to-speech engines by Mycroft AI. Over the years, Mimic, like other Mycroft components, has become clearer, faster, and more flexible.

Mimic 1 is a fast, lightweight TTS engine based on the Carnegie Mellon University FLITE software. It concatenates speech to create full phrases.

Mimic 2 is our older machine learning TTS engine designed to run in the cloud. It has been the default voice for most Mycroft installations over the years.

Mimic 3 is a privacy-focused open-source neural text-to-speech (TTS) engine that can run faster than real-time on low-end devices like the Raspberry Pi 4. In human terms, this means it sounds great, it can run entirely offline or in the cloud, and you can trust it with confidence.

Cross-Platform Support: Mimic can run on multiple operating systems, including Windows, Mac, and Linux, making it widely applicable.

Multiple Speech Synthesis Methods: Mimic supports various speech synthesis methods, including rule-based synthesis and statistical-based synthesis, allowing users to choose the appropriate method according to their needs.

eSpeak is a compact open-source software speech synthesizer designed for Linux and Windows. Originally known as Speak, it was initially developed for Acorn/RISC_OS computers starting in 1995. It was later renamed to eSpeak. While eSpeak offers clear and fast speech, it may not sound as natural or fluent as larger synthesizers based on recordings of human speech.

Lightweight: eSpeak is a lightweight speech synthesis engine with a small footprint, suitable for resource-constrained environments.

Multilingual and Voice Style Support: eSpeak supports multiple languages and voice styles, allowing users to choose the appropriate voice and style according to their needs.

Flexible Configuration: eSpeak can be flexibly configured through parameters, allowing users to adjust parameters such as pitch, speed, etc., to meet the needs of different scenarios.

YakiToMe is a free online Text-to-Speech (TTS) converter that allows you to convert text into MP3 or WAV audio file formats. You can later download the converted files to listen to them on an MP3 player. You can also share the audio files with others via email, Facebook, and more.

Online Service and API Integration: YakiToMe provides online speech synthesis services and API integration, allowing users to access and use them via the Internet, convenient and fast.

Multilingual Support: YakiToMe supports multiple languages, including English, Chinese, Japanese, etc., suitable for global users.

Customization Options: YakiToMe offers customized speech synthesis options, allowing users to adjust parameters such as voice, volume, speed, etc., according to their needs.

OpenTTS is an open-source Text-to-Speech (TTS) server that offers unified access to various TTS systems and voices in multiple languages. It supports a variety of languages and a subset of Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML), allowing the use of multiple voices and TTS systems within the same SSML document.

A notable feature of OpenTTS is its extensive language support. Integrated with various TTS systems like Larynx, Coqui-TTS, and nanoTTS, it includes languages such as English, German, French, Spanish, and more.

Multilingual Support: OpenTTS supports multiple languages, suitable for global users.

Simple and Easy to Use: OpenTTS provides a simple and easy-to-use interface and operation method, allowing users to use it without requiring a professional technical background.

Coqui TTS is a super cool text-to-speech model that allows you to clone voices in different languages with just a 3-second audio clip. You can segment the text into sentences and generate audio for each sentence. Then, concatenate the audio files to produce the final audio. Built on top of Tortoise, Coqui TTS has undergone significant model changes, making cross-lingual voice cloning and multi-lingual speech synthesis super easy.

Multilingual Support: Coqui TTS supports multiple languages, including English, Spanish, French, etc., suitable for global users.

High-Quality Speech Synthesis: Coqui TTS is based on deep learning technology, capable of generating high-quality speech synthesis that is natural and fluent.

CMU Flite (festival-lite) is a small, fast, runtime open-source text-to-speech synthesis engine developed by CMU, primarily designed for small embedded machines and/or large servers. Flite is designed as an alternative text-to-speech synthesis engine to Festival, for building voices using the FestVox voice building toolkit.

Lightweight: CMU Flite TTS is a lightweight speech synthesis engine with a small footprint, suitable for embedded systems and low-resource environments.

Fast: CMU Flite TTS has fast synthesis speed, capable of achieving real-time speech synthesis.

Multilingual Support: CMU Flite TTS supports multiple languages, suitable for global users.

ESPnet is an end-to-end speech processing toolkit that focuses primarily on end-to-end speech recognition and end-to-end text-to-speech. Currently, there are two versions: ESPnet1 and ESPnet2. ESPnet1 only supports multi-GPU training within a single node, while ESPnet2 supports distributed settings across multiple nodes. You can choose according to your needs.

End-to-End Speech Processing Toolkit: ESPnet provides an end-to-end speech processing toolkit covering multiple tasks such as speech recognition and speech synthesis.

Flexible Model Configuration: ESPnet supports flexible model configuration and training processes, allowing users to choose suitable models and parameters according to their needs.

Support for Multiple Languages and Voice Styles: ESPnet supports multiple languages and voice styles, suitable for global users.

Festival provides a general framework for building speech synthesis systems and includes examples of various modules. Overall, it offers full-text speech synthesis through many APIs: from shell-level, through a command interpreter, as a C++ library, and from Java and Emacs interfaces.

It is written in C++, uses the Edinburgh Speech Tools library for low-level architecture, and has a scheme (SIOD)-based command interpreter for control. Documentation is provided in FSF texinfo format, which can generate printed manuals, info files, and HTML.

Rich Speech Synthesis Features: Festival offers rich speech synthesis features, including pronunciation adjustment and volume control, allowing users to customize as needed.

Scalability: Festival is a modular speech synthesis system, allowing users to extend functionality through plugins to meet various needs.

Support for Multiple Languages and Voice Styles: Festival supports multiple languages and voice styles, allowing users to choose suitable voices and styles according to their needs.

Tacotron 2 and WaveGlow models constitute a text-to-speech system that allows users to synthesize natural-sounding speech from raw transcripts without requiring additional information such as prosody or speech patterns. Both models are based on NVIDIA GitHub repositories and have been trained on publicly available LJ Speech dataset.

Deep Learning-Based End-to-End Speech Synthesis System: Tacotron2 is a deep learning-based end-to-end speech synthesis system capable of generating natural and fluent speech.

High-Quality Speech Synthesis: Tacotron2, based on deep learning technology, produces high-quality and natural-sounding speech synthesis.

Support for Multiple Languages and Voice Styles: Tacotron2 supports multiple languages and voice styles, catering to different speech synthesis needs.

Part 2: The Pros and Cons of Text to Speech Open Source Software

We've discussed 10 open source text to speech software options earlier. Have you decided which one to choose? Don't rush; take a look at their pros and cons first to gain a deeper understanding.

Absolutely transparent code.

High flexibility and scalability.

Engagement with an open-source community for communication.

Open source does not necessarily mean free; some open-source code may require payment to access.

Open source models may lack official support channels or dedicated customer support teams.

Users of open source models may need to actively monitor security updates and patches.

Vulnerability exposure: With access to the source code, malicious actors can easily identify vulnerabilities in the codebase.

Part 3: AI Text to Speech Software Beyond Open Source

Here, we'd like to recommend iMyFone VoxBox software. It offers a much simpler, sleeker, and more intuitive interface compared to outdated-looking open-source software. Plus, VoxBox has a free version available for use. Unlike open-source software with language limitations, VoxBox supports over 150 languages. With AI assistance, you can even use VoxBox to generate a rap .

Feel free to download VoxBox and convert your text to speech!

• It's a software powered by AI.
• It offers a wider variety of voices and supports a broader range of languages.
• It has a low learning curve and a simple interface.
• It's feature-rich, including but not limited to text-to-speech, speech-to-text , voice cloning, etc.
• It runs smoothly without lagging.
• It provides professional customer support for one-on-one assistance.
• It's an offline software, ensuring 100% security.
• The voices sound more realistic.

Open-source text-to-speech solutions contribute significantly to the advancement of the software industry by enabling collaboration and innovation. They empower users to customize and enhance software according to their needs.

However, if you're simply looking for a reliable text-to-speech software without the need for coding, VoxBox is the perfect choice. Affordable and feature-rich, it offers an excellent alternative with comprehensive functionality. It's challenging to find such a fantastic software with a reasonable price and full features like VoxBox!

Related Articles:

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• How To Make Deep Voice Text To Speech with Voice Generators 2024
• iMyFone VoxBox Text to Speech Reviews [2024 Newest]

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Top 11 Open Source Speech Recognition/Speech-to-Text Systems

Last Updated on: March 21, 2024

A speech-to-text (STT) system , or sometimes called automatic speech recognition (ASR) is as its name implies: A way of transforming the spoken words via sound into textual data that can be used later for any purpose.

Speech recognition technology is extremely useful. It can be used for a lot of applications such as the automation of transcription, writing books/texts using sound only, enabling complicated analysis on information using the generated textual files and a lot of other things.

In the past, the speech-to-text technology was dominated by proprietary software and libraries. Open source speech recognition alternatives didn’t exist or existed with extreme limitations and no community around.

This is changing, today there are a lot of open source speech-to-text tools and libraries that you can use right now.

Table of Contents:

What is a Speech Recognition Library/System?

What is an open source speech recognition library, what are the benefits of using open source speech recognition, 1. project deepspeech, 4. flashlight asr (formerly wav2letter++), 5. paddlespeech (formerly deepspeech2), 6. openseq2seq, 10. whisper, 11. styletts2, what is the best open source speech recognition system.

It is the software engine responsible for transforming voice to texts.

It is not meant to be used by end users. Developers will first have to adapt these libraries and use them to create computer programs that can enable speech recognition to users.

Some of them come with preloaded and trained dataset to recognize the given voices in one language and generate the corresponding texts, while others just give the engine without the dataset, and developers will have to build the training models themselves.

You can think of them as the underlying engines of speech recognition programs.

If you are an ordinary user looking for speech recognition, then none of these will be suitable for you, as they are meant for development use only.

The difference between proprietary speech recognition and open source speech recognition, is that the library used to process the voices should be licensed under one of the known open source licenses, such as GPL, MIT and others.

Microsoft and IBM for example have their own speech recognition toolkits that they offer for developers, but they are not open source. Simply because they are not licensed under one of the open source licenses in the market.

Mainly, you get few or no restrictions at all on the commercial usage for your application, as the open source speech recognition libraries will allow you to use them for whatever use case you may need.

Also, most – if not all – open source speech recognition toolkits in the market are also free of charge, saving you tons of money instead of using the proprietary ones.

The benefits of using open source speech recognition toolkits are indeed too many to be summarized in one article.

Top Open Source Speech Recognition Systems

In our article we’ll see a couple of them, what are their pros and cons and when they should be used.

This project is made by Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser.

It’s a 100% free and open source speech-to-text library that also implies the machine learning technology using TensorFlow framework to fulfill its mission. In other words, you can use it to build training models by yourself to enhance the underlying speech-to-text technology and get better results, or even to bring it to other languages if you want.

You can also easily integrate it to your other machine learning projects that you are having on TensorFlow. Sadly it sounds like the project is currently only supporting English by default. It’s also available in many languages such as Python (3.6).

However, after the recent Mozilla restructure, the future of the project is unknown, as it may be shut down (or not) depending on what they are going to decide .

You may visit its Project DeepSpeech homepage to learn more.

Kaldi is an open source speech recognition software written in C++, and is released under the Apache public license.

It works on Windows, macOS and Linux. Its development started back in 2009. Kaldi’s main features over some other speech recognition software is that it’s extendable and modular: The community is providing tons of 3rd-party modules that you can use for your tasks.

Kaldi also supports deep neural networks, and offers an excellent documentation on its website . While the code is mainly written in C++, it’s “wrapped” by Bash and Python scripts.

So if you are looking just for the basic usage of converting speech to text, then you’ll find it easy to accomplish that via either Python or Bash. You may also wish to check Kaldi Active Grammar , which is a Python pre-built engine with English trained models already ready for usage.

Learn more about Kaldi speech recognition from its official website .

Probably one of the oldest speech recognition software ever, as its development started in 1991 at the University of Kyoto, and then its ownership was transferred to as an independent project in 2005. A lot of open source applications use it as their engine (Think of KDE Simon).

Julius main features include its ability to perform real-time STT processes, low memory usage (Less than 64MB for 20000 words), ability to produce N-best/Word-graph output, ability to work as a server unit and a lot more.

This software was mainly built for academic and research purposes. It is written in C, and works on Linux, Windows, macOS and even Android (on smartphones). Currently it supports both English and Japanese languages only.

The software is probably available to install easily using your Linux distribution’s repository; Just search for julius package in your package manager.

You can access Julius source code from GitHub.

If you are looking for something modern, then this one can be included.

Flashlight ASR is an open source speech recognition software that was released by Facebook’s AI Research Team. The code is a C++ code released under the MIT license.

Facebook was describing its library as “the fastest state-of-the-art speech recognition system available” up to 2018.

The concepts on which this tool is built makes it optimized for performance by default. Facebook’s machine learning library Flashlight is used as the underlying core of Flashlight ASR. The software requires that you first build a training model for the language you desire before becoming able to run the speech recognition process.

No pre-built support of any language (including English) is available. It’s just a machine-learning-driven tool to convert speech to text.

You can learn more about it from the following link .

Researchers at the Chinese giant Baidu are also working on their own speech recognition toolkit, called PaddleSpeech.

The speech toolkit is built on the PaddlePaddle deep learning framework, and provides many features such as:

• Speech-to-Text support.
• Text-to-Speech support.
• State-of-the-art performance in audio transcription, it even won the  NAACL2022 Best Demo Award ,
• Support for many large language models (LLMs), mainly for English and Chinese languages.

The engine can be trained on any model and for any language you desire.

PaddleSpeech ‘s source code is written in Python, so it should be easy for you to get familiar with it if that’s the language you use.

Developed by NVIDIA for sequence-to-sequence models training.

While it can be used for way more than just speech recognition, it is a good engine nonetheless for this use case. You can either build your own training models for it, or use models which are shipped by default. It supports parallel processing using multiple GPUs/Multiple CPUs, besides a heavy support for some NVIDIA technologies like CUDA and its strong graphics cards.

As of 2021 the project is archived; it can still be used but looks like it is no longer under active development.

Check its speech recognition documentation page for more information, or you may visit its official source code page .

One of the newest open source speech recognition systems, as its development just started in 2020.

Unlike other systems in this list, Vosk is quite ready to use after installation, as it supports 10 languages (English, German, French, Turkish…) with portable 50MB-sized models already available for users (There are other larger models up to 1.4GB if you need).

It also works on Raspberry Pi, iOS and android devices, and provides a streaming API which allows you to connect to it to do your speech recognition tasks online. Vosk has bindings for Java, Python, JavaScript, C# and NodeJS.

Learn more about Vosk from its official website .

An end-to-end speech recognition engine which implements ASR.

Written in Python and licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. Supports unsupervised pre-training and multi-GPUs training either on same or multiple machines. Built on the top of TensorFlow.

Has a large model available for both English and Chinese languages.

Visit Athena source code .

Written in Python on the top of PyTorch.

Also supports end-to-end ASR. It follows Kaldi style for data processing, so it would be easier to migrate from it to ESPnet. The main marketing point for ESPnet is the state-of-art performance it gives in many benchmarks, and its support for other language processing tasks such as speech-to-text (STT), machine translation (MT) and speech translation (ST).

Licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

You can access ESPnet from the following link .

The newest speech recognition toolkit in the family, developed by the famous OpenAI company (the same company behind ChatGPT ).

The main marketing point for Whisper is that it does not specialize in a set of training datasets for specific languages only; instead, it can be used with any suitable model and for any language. It was trained on 680 thousand hours of audio files, one third of which were non-English datasets.

It supports speech-to-text, text-to-speech, speech translation. And the company claims that its toolkit has 50% less errors in the output compared to other toolkit in the market.

Learn more about Whisper from its official website .

The newest speech recognition library on the list, which was just released in the middle of November, 2023. It employs diffusion techniques with large speech language models (SLMs) training in order to achieve more advanced results than other models.

The makers of the model published it along with a research paper, where they make the following claim about their work:

This work achieves the first human-level TTS synthesis on both single and multispeaker datasets, showcasing the potential of style diffusion and adversarial training with large SLMs.

It is written in Python, and has some Jupyter notebooks shipped with it to demonstrate how to use it. The model is licensed under the MIT license.

There is an online demo where you can see different benchmarks of the model: https://styletts2.github.io/

If you are building a small application that you want to be portable everywhere, then Vosk is your best option, as it is written in Python and works on iOS, android and Raspberry pi too, and supports up to 10 languages. It also provides a huge training dataset if you shall need it, and a smaller one for portable applications.

If, however, you want to train and build your own models for much complex tasks, then any of PaddleSpeech, Whisper and Athena should be more than enough for your needs, as they are the most modern state-of-the-art toolkits.

As for Mozilla’s DeepSpeech , it lacks a lot of features behind its other competitors in this list, and isn’t really cited a lot in speech recognition academic research like the others. And its future is concerning after the recent Mozilla restructure, so one would want to stay away from it for now.

Traditionally, Julius and Kaldi are also very much cited in the academic literature.

Alternatively, you may try these open source speech recognition libraries to see how they work for you in your use case.

The speech recognition category is starting to become mainly driven by open source technologies, a situation that seemed to be very far-fetched a few years ago.

The current open source speech recognition software are very modern and bleeding-edge, and one can use them to fulfill any purpose instead of depending on Microsoft’s or IBM’s toolkits.

If you have any other recommendations for this list, or comments in general, we’d love to hear them below!

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Originally published on August 23, 2020, Last Updated on March 21, 2024 by M.Hanny Sabbagh

Indian Language Text to Speech (TTS)

Hear2Read TTS is designed for Visually Impaired users that rely on NVDA (Non-Visual Desktop Access) to access digital content on Windows PCs.

Select one of the languages from the list below for a demo of Hear2Read TTS that generates natural human speech using Deep Neural Network models:

Have you ever browsed the internet, our most basic need today - while blindfolded? You would say “what's the use”. For a Visually Impaired (VI) person, the crucible of information that is the internet is far out of reach without text to speech technology.

Everyone with a Smart Phone uses Text To Speech (TTS) software without even thinking about it for Navigation while driving or walking.

The same technology allows VI users to read electronic content by listening, hence the phrase “Reading without Seeing” . Text to Speech (TTS) options have been widely available for English and other western languages for more than a decade. With proper accessibility tools, people with Vision Impairment (VI) can be just as effective and productive as people with normal sight in most professional jobs, including banking, engineering and teaching.

Hear2Read fills this void. Using open source Text to Speech technology, Hear2Read volunteers have released software for both Android devices and Windows PCs.

NVDA allows blind and vision impaired people to access and interact with the Windows operating system and many third party Windows applications.

Where can I find the Hear2Read Addon for NVDA

Follow the link below to Google Play to get Text to Speech for Android devices. Or click on the NVDA Addon link to download add Hear2Read Text to Speech voices as a NVDA Addon.

Hear2Read TTS for Android Devices

Hear2Read TTS using Statistical Parametric Synthesis (SPS) generated speech is available on Android devices. Hear a demo of these voices on the Text to Speech Demo page .

Where can I find Hear2Read voices for Android

How do i use hear2read tts.

Hear2Read Text to Speech (TTS) software provides a background service to convert text to speech. It can be used by any TTS-enabled App to "Read" by listening. The most common Apps that use Text to Speech software are Screen Reading Apps or eBook readers. eBook readers allow navigation within a book by chapter, page number, or bookmark, and word searches.

To find out how to download and use the Hear2Read Text to Speech software read these articles.

Using Hear2Read Text to Speech on Android Devices

Using Hear2Read Text to Speech on Windows 10/11 PCs with NVDA

Thanks to the generosity of our partners (volunteers and doners) who have supported the project since 2013, Hear2Read Apps are free to use without Ads or purchases.

• All Contents Copyright © 2014 - 2024 Hear2Read. All rights reserved.
• Hear2Read is a registered trademark of Suresh Bazaj.
• Design: Timothy White (template by HTML5 UP )

• Productivity

How to Convert a PDF to an Audiobook: A Step-by-Step Guide

Table of contents.

Ever caught yourself wishing you could listen to your PDFs while jogging, driving, or just relaxing on the couch? Turning a PDF file into an audiobook might sound like a tech wizard’s job, but it’s actually quite straightforward! Whether you’re an avid reader wanting to rest your eyes or someone with visual impairments seeking more accessible content, this tutorial will walk you through how to convert PDF documents into pleasant-sounding audiobooks.

Note : this article focuses on PDFs that you’ve created. No matter the content, whether it is a draft of a book or a report.

What You Need:

• A PDF document
• Text-to-speech software
• A little bit of patience

Step 1: Choose the Right Software

First things first, to read aloud your PDF, you’ll need some text-to-speech ( TTS ) software. Adobe Acrobat Reader is a popular choice for both Windows and macOS users. It includes a feature called “**Activate Read Out Loud**,” which can read PDF files directly. If you’re on Android , iOS , or iPad , apps like Natural Reader and Voice Over are user-friendly options with support for different languages .

Step 2: Convert PDF Text to an Audio Format

If you want a more permanent solution like an MP3 file , you’ll need to convert the PDF text . Here’s how to do it:

• Open your PDF with software like Adobe Acrobat or an online converter like Zamzar or Online-Convert . These platforms are great as they support various file formats including TXT , HTML , and WAV .
• Choose the conversion process appropriate for your needs. For example, Zamzar allows you to choose files directly from your computer, convert them into MP3 audio , and then download them.
• Save the audio file to your device.

Step 3: Customize Your Experience

Now that you’ve got your audio, you might want to tweak it a bit. Natural Reader and other software offer settings to adjust the voice’s speed and pitch, making the listening experience more enjoyable. Also, if you’re using this for language learning or need it in different languages , make sure to set that up during the conversion process .

Step 4: Sync Across Devices

For those with multiple devices, like an iPhone , iPad , Android , and MacOS , syncing your audio files across devices using cloud storage like Apple’s iCloud or Google Drive can be a game-changer. This way, you can start listening on one device and pick up where you left off on another.

Creating an audiobook from a PDF document isn’t just about listening; it’s about making information more accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities or those who simply prefer audio over text . The technology is here—**text-to-speech software** has made leaps in offering more natural-sounding voices and various audio formats to enhance the audio conversion experience.

Whether you’re a student, a professional, or someone looking to make reading more accessible due to visual impairments , converting PDFs to audiobooks is a valuable skill. So, give it a try, and who knows? You might find yourself consuming more PDFs than ever before!

Convert a PDF to an Audiobook, the easy way

As you can see, there are many steps to convert a PDF into an audiobook and if you are relatively new to this, you could get lost in step 2. However, you can create your audiobook in a much easier way.

Speechify AI Voice Generator makes this a simple process:

• Import your PDF into Speechify Studio
• Next: Choose a voice for your soon-to-be audiobook. There are 100+ voices and accents
• Want to translate it into another language other than English? That’s also pretty easy.
• Then: Want to add background music? Great. There’s plenty of free options for any genre or type of PDF you are working with.
• That’s it: Click export and you now have an audiobook.

Speechify Studio works in Chrome, Edge, Mac or Microsoft or any platform. THere’s nothing to install. Also, if you are just looking to import PDFs and have it read aloud without any of the above options?

Speechify PDF Reader might be what you are looking for. No matter the file size, simply import it into the cloud and Speechify will convert text into speech. Apart from PDFs, Speechify can also read PPTs, websites, or any text.

FAQ: Converting PDF Documents to Audiobooks

<strong>how do i turn a document into an audiobook</strong>.

To turn a document, that you’ve authored, into an audiobook, use text-to-speech (TTS) software to convert the text into an audio format such as MP3. You can do this through online converters like Speechify Voice Generator Zamzar, or applications like Adobe Acrobat Reader and Natural Reader.

<strong>How do I make a PDF read aloud?</strong>

To make a PDF read aloud, open the PDF with a program that has a read aloud feature, such as Speechify PDF Reader or Adobe Acrobat Reader, and activate the “Read Out Loud” function. This will begin reading the text of the PDF using the computer’s voice system.

<strong>What is the AI that converts PDF to audio?</strong>

The AI technology used to convert PDF to audio is generally referred to as text-to-speech (TTS) software. Popular examples include Speechify PDF Reader and Adobe Acrobat’s “Read Out Loud” feature and standalone applications like Natural Reader.

<strong>Is there an app that will read a PDF out loud?</strong>

Yes, there are several apps available that can read PDFs out loud, including Speechify PDF Reader , Adobe Acrobat Reader for desktops and Voice Dream Reader for iOS and Android devices, both of which support multiple languages and have customizable voices.

• Previous AI for Translation: Bridging Language Barriers
• Next Apps to Read PDFs on Mobile and Desktop

Cliff Weitzman

Cliff Weitzman is a dyslexia advocate and the CEO and founder of Speechify, the #1 text-to-speech app in the world, totaling over 100,000 5-star reviews and ranking first place in the App Store for the News & Magazines category. In 2017, Weitzman was named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list for his work making the internet more accessible to people with learning disabilities. Cliff Weitzman has been featured in EdSurge, Inc., PC Mag, Entrepreneur, Mashable, among other leading outlets.

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DeepSpeech is an open source embedded (offline, on-device) speech-to-text engine which can run in real time on devices ranging from a Raspberry Pi 4 to high power GPU servers.

mozilla/DeepSpeech

Folders and files, repository files navigation, project deepspeech.

DeepSpeech is an open-source Speech-To-Text engine, using a model trained by machine learning techniques based on Baidu's Deep Speech research paper . Project DeepSpeech uses Google's TensorFlow to make the implementation easier.

Documentation for installation, usage, and training models are available on deepspeech.readthedocs.io .

For the latest release, including pre-trained models and checkpoints, see the latest release on GitHub .

For contribution guidelines, see CONTRIBUTING.rst .

For contact and support information, see SUPPORT.rst .

Code of conduct

Releases 105, used by 394.

Contributors 136

• Python 21.4%
• Shell 10.8%