Best Text To Speech Apps

Find Your Voice: Top Free Text

Speech technology has rapidly improved since the start of the century. Speech technology is the assistive software that reads digital text aloud or transcribes speech into text. Youve most likely ran across this sort of technology before Siri, Alexa, and GPS voices are making text-to-speech & speech-to-text software mainstream. It is as reliable as ever. With so many apps to choose from, it can be overwhelming trying to find a perfect match.

Find your voice with our list of the top free text-to-speech apps for adults.

What Are The Best Text

Speech synthesis and speech technology have come a long way in the last few years. Now, text-to-speech software can easily be used by almost anyone to convert text files into audio featuring natural-sounding voices. With so much text-to-voice software available, it can be tough to find the best apps with the best features.

Text To Speech App Android

The Text-to-Speech App by TK Solutions is a great tool for voice narration. The app’s interface is simple and straightforward. It synthesizes voices in different languages and settings. Users can adjust the voice settings to create even more authentic results.

The app doesn’t provide an option to upload documents but the auto-expanding text box allows unlimited text-to-speech conversion. It is available for free in Playstore and supports over 30 voices and languages. Audio files can be saved in WAV format and shared with friends and family. You can also save text for future use.

Platform: Android | Costs: Free. In-app purchases | Rating: 4.3

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The Best Text To Speech Tools Money Can Buy

A summary of the best text to speech tools we reviewed:

The best all-round cloud-based TTS service for educators

Pricing Options

• Standard TTS: Up to 5 million characters per month for 12 months
• Neural TTS: Up to 1 million characters per month for 12 months

Reasons to buy

• Ability to stream converted speech audio on the go, without downloading files
• Selection of 47 voices across 24 languages
• Speech Marks work as an extra learning tool

Details

Consistently ranked by users as the best option for TTS, Amazon Polly offers both standard and neural services. Since its pay-as-you-go, theres no need to worry about subscription fees draining your bank account during the months when you arent in course production mode. Polly offers one stand-out feature for online teaching: Speech Marks, which allow you to match streaming audio with text so students can follow along. Aggregated reviews show that, while Polly is the top choice overall, users had a better support experience when using Google Text-to-Speech.

• Standard TTS: $4.00 per 4 million characters
• Neural TTS: $16.00 per 1 million characters

Details

What Is Dictation Software

As you search online for dictation software, keep in mind that it can include all different types of apps and services. The terms dictation software, speech-to-text, voice recognition, voice-to-text, and speech recognition can all mean a program that converts your voice to text on a screen in real-time. But sometimes lumped into a search for these terms are products that provide something else entirely.

For example, some products will transcribe audio files to text, but they do not transcribe your voice to text in real-time. Others market themselves as personal AI assistants and may include a dictation component. And you may run across companies that provide transcription servicesusing humans to transcribe your voice files to text.

Then there are those AI assistants built into many of the devices we use each day: Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana. These are fine for scheduling meetings, playing music, and finding a place to eat, but they aren’t designed to transcribe your articles, meetings, and other documents.

For this review, we’ve focused on software, whether standalone or embedded in a device, meant for transcribing speech to text.

But as the technology has improved over the last 20 years and costs have come down, dictation software is now as a tool to increase productivity almost instantly. Look no further than the changed working environment in the wake of COVID-19: more working from home means more opportunity to do things like dictate emails.

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Mobile Speech To Text Apps To Consider

Aside from what has already been covered above, there are an increasing number of apps available across all mobile devices for working with speech to text, not least because Google’s speech recognition technology is available for use.

iTranslate Translator is a speech-to-text app for iOS with a difference, in that it focuses on translating voice languages. Not only does it aim to translate different languages you hear into text for your own language, it also works to translate images such as photos you might take of signs in a foreign country and get a translation for them. In that way, iTranslate is a very different app, that takes the idea of speech-to-text in a novel direction, and by all accounts, does it well.

ListNote Speech-to-Text Notes is another speech-to-text app that uses Google’s speech recognition software, but this time does a more comprehensive job of integrating it with a note-taking program than many other apps. The text notes you record are searchable, and you can import/export with other text applications. Additionally there is a password protection option, which encrypts notes after the first 20 characters so that the beginning of the notes are searchable by you. There’s also an organizer feature for your notes, using category or assigned color. The app is free on Android, but includes ads.

Also consider reading these related software and app guides:

Which Are The Best Text To Speech Apps

The above applications, software, and programs are easily among the best text to speech apps that can be easily acquired on various platforms such as Playstore, apple stone, and Microsoft store. As mentioned above, these are useful and will provide a lot of utility to differently-abled people or people who cannot actively read texts from the screen. It also saves your time, money, and energy.

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T2s Text To Voice Read Aloud Android

T2S is one of the most convenient and best text-to-speech apps for Android and on PlayStore. It offers a variety of unique features that make it stand out. The app makes use of Google Text-to-Speech engines as the main API.

What makes T2S stand out from the crowd is its built-in web browser. This means that you can access web pages without copying/pasting or sharing the website links.

Some other unique features of T2S include Copy to Speak and Type Speak . You can adjust voice parameters and add effects to the speech. Along with that, users can also share and export audio files for direct use.

App Store: Playstore | Costs: Ads. In-app offers | Rating: 4.1

Advice On Microphones For Dictation

With dictation software, your voice is captured by a microphone, which is included on your device or as part of a specific software suite . For the occasional dictation user capturing notes and shopping lists, the built-in microphone should work fine. But if you’re using it more intenselyconsistently writing content, dictating meetings, sending emailsconsider something that more effectively nabs the sound waves from your voice.

For under $100, there are lots of options for headsets with mics or external microphones used by podcasters and YouTube interviewers. For this test, I used a mid-priced USB headset from Jabra for all but the mobile apps. It’s lightweight, very comfortable, and has reasonably good sound/voice quality. If you prefer not being tethered to your device, wireless options like the Jabra Elite 45h might be more your speed. And the highly-rated Blue Snowball USB microphone has a cool retro look and its own adjustable stand.

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Our Verdict Best Of The Best

Price: $0/month $249/month

Murf is enterprise-level text to speech software at a price point affordable for startups. Its the best choice for anyone from beginners to pro marketers.

The Best Part:

• Voices are really close to a real human speaking. Murf allows you to create convincing, realistic voice overs that sound like an actual human voice. You can tweak wording emphasis, add pauses, change speech patterns, and much more.

The Worst Part:

• No credits carry over. If you dont use up all your allotted words in a month, you dont get to use the extra words the next month.

Get it if you need an excellent tool, with natural-sounding voices and the capability of tweaking the speech voices to create lifelike speeches.

If youre on a budget and still need solid voice quality, go with Speechelo instead.

I recommend you get started on the free plan to give it a shot, then upgrade to the Pro plan for $26/month.

Best For

Murf is best for anyone from beginners to pros who need natural voices.

Top Features

Pricing

Murf offers four pricing plans:

• Free: Get 10 minutes of voice overs to test the software.
• Solo: $19/month for individuals getting started with AI voice generation.
• Pro: $39/month for teams that need commercial usage rights.
• Enterprise: $249+/month for companies that need to scale hard.

Murf only offers a money-back guarantee for 24 hours, for accounts that have used less than 10 minutes of text to speech conversion.

Annual subscriptions provide a 33% discount.

Best For

The Runner Up Voice Dream Reader

Voice Dreams Readeris a fully loaded text to voice app that will blow you away with its customizable capabilities. Seriously Jabba the Hutt could probably have this thing seamlessly read to him in Huttese. Its available for both iOS and Android only, no desktop optionyet.

Ok, maybe Huttese isnt a supported language, but just about everything else is. Voice Dreams text to voice reader is fully loaded with 200+ voices and 30 languages 61 of the voices are included in the app free of charge, the others can be acquired through in-app purchases.

You can read literally anything with Voice Dream PDFs, plain text, webpages, Microsoft Word and Powerpoint files, even hieroglyphics . Files can be loaded from just about anywhere, including all of the popular cloud-sharing platforms and even local files.

Voice Dream Reader gives you complete control over how your text is rendered to speech. The app supports adjustable playback speeds, and you can even customize pause times between sentences perfect for those of us looking to grab a quick cup of coffee before the next page starts!

The only thing keeping Voice Dream out of our top spot was the lack of a desktop option, but otherwise its a home run.

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Which One Of The Best Text

Even though there arent many options among these apps, you can use them so that you dont need to read your files and books, something useful for those who learn better on sound and not on sight. Which one of these is your favorite?

Dont forget to also check out all the best ways to make money online, and the funny things to tell Siri!

What Are The Limitations Of Free Tts Software

As you might expect, some free versions of TTS software do come with certain limitations. These include the amount of choices you get for the different amount of voices in some case. For instance, Zabaware gives you two for free, but you have to pay if you want more.

However, the best free software on this list come with all the bells and whistles that will be more than enough for the average user.

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Standard Tts Vs Neural Tts

Before diving into the world of text to speech, its important to know the difference between standard and neural TTS tools.

• Standard TTS is the older approach. When you think of artificial, stiff sounding TTS, youre thinking of this. But standard TTS has the benefit of being cheaper than neural TTS. Plus, a lot of the software available today lets you make adjustments to standard output, so you can change the length of pauses, the speed of speech, and how words are pronounced.
• Neural TTS draws on neural network technology, or AI, to generate more natural-sounding speech. In essence, a computer program is fed thousands of hours of human speech, accompanied by text, and learns how to imitate a human reading something aloud. Dont let that creep you out, though. Even if its more expensive than standard TTS, neural TTS can create some truly lifelikeand listenableaudio.

To date, the only way to get free neural TTS services is to sign up for a trial for a paid service.

Text To Speech: Audio Books

This is another decent app for iOS phones or converting text into speech and as you can see its simple to navigate and responsive. You will find here a great list of options for your text-to-speech needs. Here you can import texts and images from the phone storage and gallery, camera, text, links, or cloud storage.

You can also include any text from almost any place and have it read out to you by Cutting Edge artificial intelligence. By the way, The Voice here sounds more natural and lifelike than the voices offered by other apps on this list.

The only thing is that the number of voices offered in this free version will be quite limited and in order to get the full diversity you will need to go for the paid subscription. So for those whose ears are extra sensitive to artificial speech, this is a great option.

You can also play around with the speed of the playback making the voice sound faster in case you need to read a certain extract of the text as quickly as possible. Additionally, you can categorize your text into folders.

And for easy access, the app will highlight the word which is being spoken so its easier for you to follow. Once again, we highly recommend paying attention to the quality of the voices in this app because its really good.

This app also is a great solution for users with reading dyslexia. The speed of reading can be increased up to five times faster.

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Speech Central Ios Android

Labsii’s Speech Central is more than just a voice narration app. It allows you to explore the web, listen to headlines, and your favorite content via a Bluetooth headset.

The app is created especially for visually impaired users. Its features include support for DAISY books, dyslexia-friendly fonts, and keyboard shortcuts for most commands. You may also use Speech Central on the iPhone with your headset.

Users can import articles, build their knowledge base, and create MP3 files too. It’s a great tool for daily personal use, self-development, and an excellent way to cut down your screen time or boost productivity.

Get Speech Central on iOS, Playstore, Windows 10, and your Macbook. The text-to-speech app is available for free with restrictions on the number of articles that you can add. The restrictions are removed when you upgrade to the pro version.

App Store: iOS, Playstore, Microsoft, Amazon | Costs: Free. In-app offersReview: 4.5

Text To Speech Software

Fact Check: Technavio

Pro-Tips: If you have limited use of text-to-speech software, then its best to go for free tools there are plenty of them available. However, if you seek advanced features and dont like restrictions on usage, then paid versions are ideal.

Amongst paid text-to-speech tools, you should look for text to speech software with natural voices enabled. A top-rated solution should offer real-time speech features and have a simple & usable interface.

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Recommended By Our Editors

Most people don’t need to install software to dictate text to their computer or phone. That’s because every major operating system has a speech-to-text feature built in, and they work about as well as anything else on the market. Here we point out where to find these features on your device, and talk about a powerful commercial product with more features, should you need to do more with a speech-to-text tool than the built-in options offer.

Best Speech-to-Text Tool for Windows

Naturalreader App Ios Android

The next option is called NaturalReader. This is one of the top choices available for mobile devices, but the free version leaves a lot to be desired. The premium version is one of the most expensive options available, and the free version is really a skeleton, bare-bones program. That being said, the program is easy to use, and it provides you with plenty of options. Consider using this program for your narration needs.

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How To Choose The Best Free Text

Why you can trust TechRadar Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.

When selecting the best free text-to-speech software is best for you depends on a range of factors .

Despite how simple the concept of text-to-speech is, there are many different features and aspects to such apps to take into consideration. These include how many voice options and customizations are present, how and where they operate in your setup, what formats they are able to read aloud from and what formats the audio can be saved as.

With free versions, naturally you’ll want to take into account how many advanced features you get without paying, and whether any sacrifices are made to performance or usability.

Always try to keep in mind what is fair and reasonable for free services – and as we’ve shown with our number one choice, you can get plenty of features for free, so if other options seem bare in comparison, then you’ll know you can do better.