Natural Readers Tested

Published: Jun 20, 2007

Rick Carruth, BellaOnline’s shareware and freeware editor tested the Natural Reader and he is positive about this AT&T free text-to-screen (TTS) reader.

Carruth said: “It’s been my personal experience that, unless you need the enhanced voices, the free version will work fine for most customers.” This free software allows you to convert any text to speech. Highlighting any text and pasting it into the reading area of the software will allow you to listen to the text while you perform other task at your computer.
 
Utilizing the “Microsoft Mary” voice, Natural Reader provides a very good substitute for the real thing. Although slightly robotic, which is to be expected with most text-to-speech programs, you can easily understand Microsoft Mary without extra effort.
 
Additional features include being able to convert text to a WAV or MP3 audio file. Although I have not tried this feature, I can see the advantage of being able to burn pages of text to a CD and listen to it at my leisure.
Students of any age would benefit by recording pages of reading assignments and listening to them on your iPod, PocketPCs and CD players.
 
Total download is about 10 MB for the free version. Visit their web site at:
www.NaturalReaders.com to listen to voice samples before downloading and view the pricing structure for the advanced version.
 
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